Do All Cap Badges Have a Motto? What the Latin Actually Means

October 31, 2026

Look closely at a lot of British Army cap badges and you'll spot a small ribbon or scroll with a few Latin words on it. Not every badge has one, but a genuinely large number do — a tradition borrowed straight from British heraldry, where a motto was as much a part of a coat of arms as the imagery itself. Here are some of the best, and what they actually mean.

Genuine The Rifles green wool beret with insignia, Celer et Audax motto

Genuine Rifles beret and badge — "Celer et Audax" is on the badge itself if you look closely.

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A few genuinely good ones

The Rifles — Celer et Audax, "Swift and Bold." Fits perfectly with the fast-marching, skirmishing tradition covered in our regimental quirks guide.
Parachute Regiment — Utrinque Paratus, "Ready for Anything." About as fitting as a motto gets for a unit that jumps out of planes into the unknown.
Royal Corps of Signals — Certa Cito, "Swift and Sure" — a nod to reliable, fast communication, exactly the corps' job.
Duke of Wellington's Regiment — Virtutis Fortuna Comes, "Fortune Favours the Brave."
Royal Northumberland Fusiliers — a motto translating roughly to "Where the Fates Call."
Special Air Service — Who Dares Wins — unusually, in plain English rather than Latin, and probably the most widely recognised motto in the entire British Army, well beyond military circles. See our beret colours guide for the full SAS beret story.

Why the tradition exists at all

Regimental mottos descend directly from the same heraldic tradition as coats of arms and family crests — a short phrase meant to sum up a unit's values or history in a way that survives being shrunk down onto a badge a couple of centimetres wide. Latin specifically was the standard choice because it was the traditional language of heraldry across Europe, not because the regiments themselves were especially Latin-speaking — much like how legal and scientific Latin persists today for the same reason: it's a shared, stable, prestige language that doesn't shift meaning over time the way living languages do.

Not every badge has one

Plenty of genuine cap badges carry no motto at all, relying purely on their imagery and the unit's name — mottos are common, not universal. Don't assume a badge is somehow incomplete or unofficial just because there's no scroll of Latin on it.

Why it matters for buyers

A cap badge's exact motto (and how it's abbreviated on the scroll) is a genuine, reliable way to confirm which regiment a piece of genuine insignia actually belongs to, especially useful when a badge design has changed slightly over different eras.

Trying to translate or identify a motto on a specific badge? Email us at sales@jungleuk.com and we'll help.

Mottoes in languages other than Latin

Latin dominates, but it is far from the whole story, and the exceptions are some of the most interesting badges in the British Army.

French — a legacy of the Norman and medieval heraldic tradition, which is why some of the oldest formations carry French rather than Latin.
Gaelic and Welsh — used by regiments with strong national identity, and a deliberate statement of it.
Nepali — the Gurkha regiments, whose motto is famously blunt and famously not in Latin.
English — more common than people expect, particularly on newer formations and on corps rather than regiments.

Reading a worn motto

The scroll carrying the motto is usually the thinnest, most exposed part of a cap badge, so it is the first thing to wear away. On a heavily polished badge it can be almost gone.

Two tricks help. Hold the badge at a shallow angle to a single light source rather than under flat light — raking light throws the remaining relief into shadow and letters reappear. And count the letters and word shapes rather than trying to read it: with a short list of candidate regiments, the pattern of word lengths usually identifies it even when the letters themselves are illegible.