This work presents a detailed study of the dispersion of capillary waves with small amplitude in viscous fluids using an analytically derived solution to the initial value problem of a small-amplitude capillary wave as well as direct numerical simulation. A rational parametrization for the dispersion of capillary waves in the underdamped regime is proposed, including predictions for the wave number of critical damping based on a harmonic-oscillator model. The scaling resulting from this parametrization leads to a self-similar solution of the frequency dispersion of capillary waves that covers the entire underdamped regime, which allows an accurate evaluation of the frequency at a given wave number, irrespective of the fluid properties. This similarity also reveals characteristic features of capillary waves, for instance that critical damping occurs when the characteristic time scales of dispersive and dissipative mechanisms are balanced. In addition, the presented results suggest that the widely adopted hydrodynamic theory for damped capillary waves does not accurately predict the dispersion when viscous damping is significant, and an alternative definition of the damping rate, which provides consistent accuracy in the underdamped regime, is presented.