Q. I’m confused about this issue of whether to add a space after the abbreviation “w/” (with). A previous answer said that there should be a space because the abbreviation stands for a full word, which would have a space after it if written out. But CMOS 6.116 shows no spaces around a slash that stands for “per” or that is used in an abbreviation like “c/o” (in care of) or “n/a” (not applicable). So why is “w/” treated differently?

A. In an expression like “km/s” (kilometers per second) or “$450/week” (450 dollars per week), the slash is a stand-alone abbreviation for “per.” If you were to add a space in either of those expressions, you’d need two of them (one before and one after the slash). In an expression like “c/o” or “n/a,” the slash is a kind of shorthand that tells readers to interpret the letters as abbreviations; it belongs equally to both letters.

The abbreviation “w/” is very much like “c/o” and “n/a” but with only one rather than two abbreviated letters. (Each of those could be written instead with periods, but the slash nonetheless became the convention.) But whereas c pairs with o and n with a, that w is, as our original answer suggested, a single entity that doesn’t normally pair with anything, so it’s usually separated from what comes next by a space.

That’s the editorial logic anyway. The abbreviation “w/” is casual. Any rule regarding its use should be taken w/ a grain of NaCl (and with the understanding that no rule is w/out exceptions).

Q. Is the following sentence correct? “Do the speaker or the characters have any specific personality traits that are highlighted throughout the poem?” According to CMOS 5.143, “When a verb has two or more subjects connected by or or nor, the verb agrees with the last-named subject” (e.g., “Bob or his friends have your key”; “neither the twins nor Jon is prepared to leave”). Based on that, it seems like it would be correct. “Characters” is closest to the verb, so that part is correct. I’m wondering if the auxiliary verb should match the verb or the subject closest to it? “Do the speaker or the characters have . . .” “Does the speaker or the characters have . . .” I’m probably overthinking this, but I can’t find any definitive answers when it comes to questions with compound subjects—one singular and one plural—joined by “or.” Could you point me to a rule that might address this? Thank you for your help.

A. We haven’t been able to find anything definitive either. So let’s try to invent something—we can call it the inverted-proximity rule—by adding on to the current wording in CMOS 5.143 (the new part is underlined):

When a verb has two or more subjects connected by or or nor, the verb agrees with the last-named subject; however, in a question that begins with an auxiliary verb, the auxiliary usually agrees with the first-named subject.

Here’s what that would look like relative to your example, starting with each subject used alone (and shortening your original predicate to make the examples easier to digest):

Does the speaker have any faults?

Do the characters have any faults?

Does the speaker or the characters have any faults?

That last example, where the auxiliary “Does” agrees with the subject “speaker,” seems to work well enough. But so does “Do the speaker or the characters have . . .” The problem with any rule based on a subject’s proximity to the verb is that a singular and a plural subject joined by or will tend to read as plural regardless of the order of subjects.

The remedy for questions, when you don’t like the result, is to put the plural subject first: “Do the characters or the speaker have any faults?” That fix can work for statements also: “Either Bob or his friends have your key” seems to work slightly better than “Either Bob’s friends or Bob has your key.”

In sum, for a plural and a singular subject joined by or (or nor), apply the proximity rule as stated above; if the result seems awkward, try switching the order of subjects.

Q. When referring to two doctors in a letter, should they be addressed as “Dr. A and Dr. B”? Or “Drs. A and B”?

A. For extra formality, use Drs., which echoes the old-fashioned Messrs. (the plural of Mr.) and would be especially well suited to the salutation. But if your letter isn’t especially formal, or if you’re simply naming the two doctors (as in the body of the letter), use Dr. before both names.

Q. According to CMOS 6.86, “The en dash can be used in place of a hyphen in a compound adjective when one of its elements consists of an open compound.” And according to 5.96, “If a compound noun is an element of a phrasal adjective, the entire compound noun must be hyphenated to clarify the relationship among the words,” as in the example “time-clock-punching employees.” But “time clock” is an open compound, so this seems contradictory. Am I misunderstanding something?

A. Those two paragraphs do seem to contradict each other, but it’s important to note that CMOS would recommend reworking the phrase “time clock–punching employees,” if possible, to avoid the need for an en dash. The problem is that more than a few readers will assume that the en dash is simply a kind of hyphen (if they notice the difference at all), which could result in a misreading, at least initially, of “clock-punching employees” who are somehow modified by “time.”

A phrase like “Civil War–era veterans,” by contrast, is a little easier to parse, thanks to the initial caps, which can help readers to understand that “Civil War” is a single term joined to the word “era.” The lowercase term “time clock,” though it’s common enough, doesn’t stand out in the same way. That’s why “country music–influenced lyrics” (the analogous example in CMOS 6.86) is followed by an alternative: “lyrics influenced by country music.”

We could have offered a second alternative: “country-music-influenced lyrics” (with two hyphens). But the noun phrase “country music” doesn’t seem to need a hyphen even when it’s used attributively before another noun, as in “country music lyrics,” which rarely appears anywhere with a hyphen (even though “country-music lyrics,” with a hyphen, wouldn’t be technically wrong; see CMOS 7.91 for a fuller explanation).

The phrase “time-clock punching,” however, seems to benefit from the hyphen, even though “time clock” is normally unhyphenated as a noun. That’s why “time-clock-punching employees”—where the whole phrase is used attributively—is our preference in CMOS (not only in chapter 5 but also in our hyphenation guide, section 1, under “noun + gerund”).

If you don’t like all those hyphens, try “employees who punch a time clock”—or, yes, use an en dash: “time clock–punching employees.” Some (many?) readers may not notice your en dash, but IYKYK.

Extra credit: What about “time-clock–punching employees,” with a hyphen and an en dash? That’s not a terrible idea (it does signal the hierarchy of relationships in the phrase), but it’s not Chicago style.

Q. In a series that contains titles with internal commas, would you use commas or semicolons to separate each item? For instance, how would you punctuate “the films The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, With Six You Get Eggroll, and Die, Monster, Die!”?

A. We’ve gotten many variations on this question over the years. In general, if a series is clear to you with commas, and you think it will be clear to your readers—and especially if you are resistant to semicolons or think they wouldn’t be a good fit for your document—then keep the commas. Otherwise, use semicolons instead; that’s what they’re for (among other things, as this sentence demonstrates).

Whether you choose commas or semicolons as separators, make sure you don’t italicize them along with the titles (any punctuation within a title remains in italics; see CMOS 6.2). For the lack of a serial comma in the title of the first movie (which follows the usage in that movie’s title sequence), see 8.167.

Q. I’m looking for a source for guidelines on what to display on a website when only one source is referenced in an online article. Is it okay to still put 1? I have previously been told by college professors and professional colleagues to substitute an asterisk instead.

A. If there’s a note number 1, readers may expect to find a note number 2 later in the same document. For that reason, using an asterisk instead of a number can make sense when there’s just one note. But there isn’t any general rule that we know of that says you must do this.

Let’s say, for example, that an academic journal uses author-date style supplemented by numbered notes for substantive comments, and that most articles in that journal include more than one note. It would be reasonable in that case, as a matter of consistency across articles, to assign a number even in the case of only one footnote.

So if you have the option of using an asterisk, consider doing so, but it’s not a requirement. For the answer to a similar question about whether to number a single figure in a document, see this Q&A (which links to the seventeenth edition of CMOS but still applies).

Q. “He wanted to see his friend John Smith before going out”? Or “He wanted to see his friend, John Smith, before going out”? I know the rule for spouses and siblings (as in CMOS 6.31), but what about friends?

A. Because people usually have more than one friend, the first version, the one without commas, will almost always be correct. Even those who might claim to have just one friend could make another one at any time. Besides, friend is an elastic concept that can apply to people who aren’t exactly “friends.”

All this to say that, without additional context, the word friend by itself isn’t enough to tell us who you’re talking about in an example like yours (Which friend?), so the name (John Smith) is essential (or restrictive) and shouldn’t be set off by commas.

By contrast, people generally have only one spouse at a time, making commas the default when a name follows a word like husband or wife: “She wanted to see her husband, John Smith, before going out.” In that sentence, the word husband alone narrows things down to one person; the name gives extra information that isn’t essential (it’s nonrestrictive) and is thus set off by commas. (They’re called spousal commas and not friendship commas for a reason.)

For more on commas like these (and why even spousal commas can be omitted sometimes), see “Your Dog[,] Smurf: Understanding Commas with Appositives,” at CMOS Shop Talk.

Q. Do we refer to fictional characters by their first or last name?

A. Either, neither, or both. In fiction, people are known by the names they’re called, typically by the narrator but sometimes by others (as in dialogue). In other words, whether you’re referring to Huck Finn or Jo March or Edward Casaubon or Heathcliff or Juliet or Romeo or Elinor Dashwood or Don Quixote or Miss Marple (or Miss Jane Marple if you prefer, at least on first mention), you can usually take your cue from the novel or story or play or other such work that features them.

You can do the same for any mentions after the first, as in Huck or Jo or Casaubon or Heathcliff or Juliet or Romeo or Elinor (not to be confused with Mrs. Dashwood) or Don Quixote or Miss Marple. When more than one form could be used, shorter may be preferred over longer, as with Jo (who is rarely “Josephine” in Little Women) and Huck (as he’s usually called in Huckleberry Finn even when the last name is used, in spite of the title) and Casaubon (even though, in Middlemarch, he’s called “Mr. Casaubon” five times as often as “Casaubon”).

Speaking of George Eliot’s quixotic, tragicomic scholar (Casaubon, that is), you could likewise shorten “Don Quixote” to “Quixote,” even though that more famous character is rarely mentioned without his honorific in the four-hundred-year-old novel that brought him to life.

Though all the characters mentioned above are from older classics, the principle for newer works is the same—as it is when you’re writing the characters yourself—though there will always be some exceptions.

Q. Correct to hyphenate “four-hundredth birthday”? Seems right, but I can’t find a source. Thank you!

A. Though the hyphen doesn’t do any harm in your example, you can normally leave it out. See the hyphenation guide at CMOS 7.96, section 1, under “numbers, spelled out,” which says this (the rule is stated on the right and the examples are on the left):

The last example—“five hundred fifty-second contestant” (some writers would add “and” before “fifty-second”)—is analogous to “four hundredth contestant” (or “four hundredth birthday”); “fifty-second” is hyphenated in the example in CMOS because “fifty-two” is normally hyphenated.

Note that some of the numbers above would normally be written with numerals (e.g., 552nd). And though four hundred is usually spelled out according to Chicago’s general rule for numbers (which says to spell out the whole numbers zero through one hundred and extends to multiples of a hundred), you’d usually write 400th if you were following Chicago’s alternative rule (see CMOS 9.2, 9.3, and 9.4).

It should also be noted that a number like four hundred is hyphenated sometimes—for example, when it forms part of a compound modifier (“four-hundred-acre farm”); see section 1 of the hyphenation guide, under “number + noun.”

Q. I haven’t been able to find anything in CMOS about how to punctuate a sentence that begins with a dependent clause that consists of two independent clauses introduced by a word like “If.” I’m a proofreader for court reporters. One of my clients consistently puts a comma within this type of dependent clause, but I don’t think the comma should be there. The comma I’m asking about is the comma after the word “valve” in the following example: “If you had to replace a leaking valve, and it had external insulation, how long would that work take?” To me, the part about external insulation is restrictive and should not be preceded by a comma. I’d like to find some authoritative confirmation of that. Thank you.

A. We agree that the first comma in your example is best omitted, not because the clause following and is restrictive (and doesn’t normally work that way) but because that comma competes with the one that is normally required after an if clause. So:

If you had to replace a leaking valve, how long would that work take? (The comma is required; see CMOS 6.26.)

If you had to replace a leaking valve and it had external insulation, how long would that work take? (A comma after “valve” would be strictly correct but is usually best omitted.)

To make a long story short, omitting the comma after valve from your example makes it clearer that the introductory If applies to both clauses (i.e., “you had . . .” and “it had . . .”). For a similar take, see this previous Q&A (which refers to the 17th ed. but still applies).

To understand how all this works, it might also help to consider your example sentence with that instead of and (though in your situation any changes to wording presumably wouldn’t be an option):

If you had to replace a leaking valve that had external insulation, how long would that work take?

In that case, that introduces a restrictive relative clause (see CMOS 6.29). And though it doesn’t change the meaning of your example, the word that can help ensure a restrictive reading of the “insulation” clause.

We’ll try to clarify these options in a future edition of CMOS.

Q. Do you recommend capitalizing offices such as the Office of the Attorney General and the Office of the City Clerk? These are formal names for administrative bodies, but they are shared names. In other words, every city has an Office of the City Clerk.

A. You can usually use initial caps for the name of a specific office but lowercase when referring to such an office as a generic term or concept. For example, we’d advise lowercase for your last sentence, where the use is clearly generic: “Every city has an office of the city clerk.”

The main reason for lowercase in that last sentence is that “Office of the City Clerk” may not reflect the wording used by each such office. Here are a few more examples:

Illinois’s Office of the Attorney General was established in 1818.

The Office of the City Clerk for Chicago can be found at City Hall.

Portugal’s Ministry of Finance (Ministério das Finanças) is headquartered in Lisbon.

but

In many countries, the treasury department is known as the ministry of finance.

Most states have an office of the attorney general.

The city clerk’s office is on the first floor.

See also CMOS 8.63–71.

Q. How would you cite the publication date of a republished journal article? For example, a piece that was published in 1967 but can only (easily) be found as a republication in the fiftieth anniversary of the journal it was originally published in. Do you cite the newer date, the original date, or both? I’m procrastinating on writing a final paper by scrolling the Q&A, but I’m not having any luck finding the answer!

A. Normally, you should cite the version you consulted or the best version if you consulted more than one. But Chicago-style source citations can easily accommodate extra details, so if you think it’s important to acknowledge more than one version, you can do that.

To take an example that’s similar to what you’re describing, you could cite the following article as it appeared in a fiftieth-anniversary special issue of the Journal of Literary Semantics and then add info about the original publication (in this case, after the DOI):

Dry, Helen Aristar. “The Movement of Narrative Time.” In “50th Anniversary Issue,” edited by Marina Lambrou, Journal of Literary Semantics 51, no. s1 (2022): 19–53. https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2021-2043. Facsimile of the article as originally published in Journal of Literary Semantics 12, no. 2 (1983), with the same page numbers.

The wording related to the extra info will depend on the source. In a bibliography or reference list entry, this info follows the period at the end of the main citation; in a note, it can follow a semicolon or start a new sentence (or, if the information is brief, it can go in parentheses).

In an author-date reference list, you could cite both publication dates:

Dry, Helen Aristar. (1983) 2022. “The Movement of Narrative Time.” In “50th Anniversary Issue,” edited by Marina Lambrou, Journal of Literary Semantics 51 (s1): 19–53. https://doi.org/10.1515/jls-2021-2043. Facsimile of the article as originally published in Journal of Literary Semantics 12, no. 2 (1983), with the same page numbers.

In the text, the author-date citation would be “(Dry [1983] 2022).” For more details and examples, see CMOS 14.16 (on reprint editions) and 14.77 (on journal special issues).