Q. CMOS 14.195 explains how to include the headline names of regular columns or features in a footnote citation, but how should they appear if mentioned in the main text: italicized, in quotes, or roman? Thanks!
A. Use roman and initial caps in both contexts—for example, when you mention or cite the article “My Spectacular Betrayal” in the Modern Love column in the New York Times.1 The lack of quotation marks helps keep the name of the column distinct from the article title. See also CMOS 8.177.
__________
1. Samantha Silva, “My Spectacular Betrayal,” Modern Love, New York Times, May 19, 2023.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Should “that” be capitalized in titles? Does it depend on usage? Take, for example, this title: “Features of the Website That Are Offered as Premium.” Thanks!
A. The word that is always capitalized in a title. That’s because that’s never a preposition, and though it can function as a conjunction—for example, when it introduces a subordinate clause (e.g., “Tell Me That You Mean It”)—it isn’t one of the seven common coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, nor, for, so, yet). In your example, “That” is a relative pronoun.
For more details and examples, see CMOS 8.159 and 8.160.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. An author of a book I’m copyediting wishes to italicize the books of the Bible (Genesis, etc.) on the grounds that the convention of using roman type for sacred works is based on the assumption that these texts were divinely inspired rather than authored by humans (an assumption this author is challenging). The author would add a note explaining this style choice.
I cannot, however, find anything about the basis for the rule that the titles of “highly revered works” (from CMOS 8.103) should not be italicized. Do you know the original rationale for the convention?
A. The lack of italics for the Bible and its books probably has less to do with divine inspiration than with the fact that the word “bible” comes from Greek biblia, meaning “books.” “The Bible,” then, is the proper name for a special set of books rather than the formal title of a publication.
The same might be said of the Koran, or Qur’an, a title that in Arabic means “recitation.” Other sacred works have similarly generic or descriptive titles.
As for Genesis, Exodus, and so on, had the Bible been published as a book for the first time today, it would have been called The Bible (in italics), and each major “book” therein would have been treated as a titled chapter or section and put in quotation marks: “Genesis,” “Exodus,” etc.
Ultimately, it’s up to the author how to style such names. But you might ask your author to consider the idea that the stylistic conventions for referring to the Bible and its books predate modern publishing (and its style guides).
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Is it okay to write “New York Times bestseller” even though the list is called “The New York Times Best Sellers”? The advice in CMOS 8.172 does not really cover this scenario. Thank you!
A. Yes. Unless you’re referring specifically to the title of that list (as it’s styled on the Times website), you can use the name of the publication (New York Times) attributively and treat “bestseller” as an ordinary noun (as you’ve done).
(Note that the entry at Merriam-Webster.com for “bestseller” was updated in 2022 to list the one-word form ahead of two-word “best seller,” an equal variant. References on this site to “best seller” predate that change.)
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. What is the correct way to write “four o’clock” as a book title?
A. Treat the contracting apostrophe in “o’clock” as if it were a hyphen and write Four O’Clock—capital O and C. The O is capitalized as the first word in a compound term, and the C because clock is a noun. If it helps, think of the title as short for “Four Of-the-Clock” (rather than “Four of the Clock”—though the latter is how the term would normally be spelled out).
See also CMOS 8.161, which explains Chicago’s rules for capitalizing hyphenated compounds in titles.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. In CMOS 8.161 (on hyphenated compounds in headline-style titles), the word “Speaking” in the example “Non-English-Speaking Representatives” is capitalized, going against rule 3. Since “non-” is a prefix and cannot stand alone as a word, shouldn’t “speaking” be lowercase? Thank you for your explanation.
A. The point of rule 3 is this: If the unhyphenated form might conceivably be spelled as one word, then use lowercase for subsequent elements:
Are Antihistamines Overprescribed? (lowercase h in “histamines”)
Are Anti-intellectuals Overrated? (lowercase i in “intellectuals”)
But “NonEnglishspeaking” would never be correct, so “Speaking” needs to be capitalized. For hyphens with prefixes, see CMOS 7.89, section 4.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. When an author publishes a work that violates Chicago’s headline capitalization style, should we convert the citation to Chicago style or leave it as the author designated? Is this discussed anywhere in CMOS?
A. It’s not uncommon for the title of a book, article, or other work to use a capitalization style that’s different from the one recommended by Chicago. In (almost) all cases, Chicago style (or whatever style you follow) would take precedence when such a title is mentioned in the text. Most advise applying some variation of headline style (a.k.a. title case).
For example, both the cover and title page for Finding Me, the memoir by Viola Davis (HarperOne, 2022), feature all caps: FINDING ME. Chicago style, as we’ve just seen, would apply title case (and italics).
Or there’s The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor—the Truth and the Turmoil, by Tina Brown (Crown, 2022). On that book’s cover and title page, the main title is in all caps, and the subtitle is in title case. There’s no colon between title and subtitle. Chicago style imposes title case for the main title and adds a colon (see CMOS 8.165).
Not that we’d never make an exception. For example, Chicago style would normally call for Star Trek: Into Darkness as the title of that 2013 film. Both the movie posters and the title screen itself feature all-caps “STAR TREK” on its own line; “INTO DARKNESS” is on the line below that, in a type size that differentiates it from the line above. CMOS would therefore treat “Star Trek” as the main title and “Into Darkness” as the subtitle—adding a colon between the two.
But we know that—after much debate—the world seems to have settled on Star Trek Into Darkness (capital I, no colon). The preposition “into” wouldn’t normally merit a capital I without the colon, and the absence of a colon does seem a little odd, but we’d allow both exceptions in the spirit of maintaining intergalactic harmony.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Is the word “to” capitalized in a title or heading when used as part of an infinitive verb?
A. Whoever decided that “to” should be considered part of the infinitive verb form in English has caused more trouble than such a small word is worth (see “infinitives, split”). It certainly doesn’t merit capitalization in titles. The first eleven editions of CMOS said to capitalize all “important” words in a title: “nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, first words, and last words.” Starting with the twelfth edition, that advice was expanded to clarify that “verbs” did not extend to the “to” in infinitives, which should remain lowercase in titles (see CMOS 8.169 in the current, or seventeenth, edition). So,
Born to Run (where “to” marks the infinitive)
“Midnight Train to Georgia” (where “to” is a preposition)
But, when “to” is the first or last word,
To Kill a Mockingbird (infinitive marker)
To the Lighthouse (preposition)
“If You Asked Me To” (infinitive marker [verb implied])
Exceptions in the middle of a title would be rare. Here’s one, in the title of an article from volume 2012 of the journal Supreme Court Review:
“ ‘To Regulate,’ Not ‘To Prohibit’: Limiting the Commerce Power”
CMOS doesn’t cover that scenario. (If we did, we might say to capitalize the first and last words in a quoted phrase within a title.) Rarer still would be a title that featured “to” as an adverb—as in the phrase “come to” in the sense of “regain consciousness.” You’ll have to take our word for it that we’d capitalize the T in that case.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I work on science textbooks and science trade books (I wonder why I’ve never needed to ask this question before) and have this question: Does one capitalize “sp.” (or “spp.”) in titles? For example: “Dinarda Spp.: The Sneaky Thief.” Unabbreviated, the word “species” would be capitalized. However, were it the actual species name, it would be lowercased. It does look odd capitalized, since it is never so in text, but I’m leaning toward capitalization as being correct. Possibly the answer to this question lies within (within CMOS, that is), but if so I’ve not been able to find it. What say you?
A. CMOS comes close to answering this question. According to paragraph 8.159, which outlines the principles of headline-style capitalization (a.k.a. title case), the second part of a species name is always lowercase in a title, even if it’s the last word in the title or subtitle. So,
“Dinarda dentata: A Sneaky Thief”
and
“Dinarda maerkelii: Another Sneaky Thief”
And though we don’t quite say this in CMOS, more than one species of the genus Dinarda would follow the same pattern, even when the abbreviation “spp.” (species, plural) stands in for the names:
“Dinarda spp.: The Sneaky Thief”
In sum, use lowercase for “spp.” (and for the singular “sp.”) wherever it occurs in a title or heading. Thanks for giving us this opportunity to clarify our rule.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Hello: When using headline-style capitalization (CMOS 8.159), does a participial preposition (CMOS 5.175) appear in lowercase or uppercase? Thanks very much.
A. Chicago lowercases all prepositions in titles, including words that aren’t always prepositions. For example, we’d write The World according to Garp. Most so-called participial prepositions (verb forms that can also function as prepositions)—according (to), assuming, barring, concerning, considering, during, notwithstanding, owing (to), provided, regarding, respecting, and speaking (of), among others—rarely appear in titles of works. And the ones that occur most often (like “according to,” “considering,” and “during”) normally function as prepositions, which makes the job of an editor following Chicago style a little easier. (A title like “Teachers According More Time to Students,” in which “According” functions as a verb and is therefore capitalized, would be hard to find.) Note that other styles capitalize prepositions based on length alone. AP and APA, for example, capitalize words of more than three letters, including prepositions; Chicago and MLA lowercase all prepositions regardless of length.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]