Q. Small question, but should you use a person’s middle initial in running text or is it acceptable to just use the first and last name? I see mixed usage at my job and would like to encourage consistency with solid grounding from the manual. Thanks!

A. Names are so variable (not to mention personal) that the best we can do is to offer some general guidelines. First, it’s usually fine to use only a first and last name when referring to someone by their full name (as on first mention), even if that person is known to have a middle initial. In fact, for most names it will be preferable to omit a middle initial.

But you’ll want to make an exception for any name that’s normally spelled with an initial or that might be ambiguous without one. This would include people like John D. Rockefeller, Samuel L. Jackson, and Michael J. Fox; it would also include lesser-known individuals whose names usually appear with an initial (whether in published works or elsewhere).

And when naming the author of a particular book or other work, it can be helpful on first mention to use the form as it appears in the work itself (as on a title page), especially if the name may not be familiar to your intended audience. Also (though it probably goes without saying), a name like I. M. Pei generally retains initials whenever mentioned in full (i.e., don’t write “I. Pei”). And don’t substitute an initial for a middle name that’s normally spelled out (e.g., James Earl [not E.] Jones).

In other words, consistency may not be a realistic goal, but with a little editorial discretion backed up by some basic research, you should be able to determine which names will need or benefit from an initial and which ones (usually most of them) can go without.

Q. When a map is inserted sideways on a verso page, which direction should it face? Should the top of the map be near the gutter or near the outside margin? Is there a standard?

A. The practice at the University of Chicago Press is to rotate the image 90 degrees counterclockwise, which would mean that the top of the map is toward the outside margin on a verso (left-hand) page but toward the middle of the book (the gutter or binding) on a recto (right-hand) page.

A map rotated in this way is called a broadside figure (as defined in the glossary at the end of CMOS). In most books, pages are taller than they are wide, so a broadside figure will usually be in landscape (▭) rather than portrait (▯) orientation before being rotated.

Q. According to Merriam-Webster, “than” can function as a conjunction or a preposition. If using title case, would you capitalize “than” in the following title? “There Is More Than One Path to a Successful Meal.” I think so, but I’m not sure what part of speech “than” is in expressions like “more than” and “less than.” Thanks!

A. When than is followed by a noun that acts as its object, then it’s a preposition and can be lowercased in a title; if it’s instead followed by a clause (with a subject and a verb—though the verb is sometimes omitted but understood), then assume it’s a conjunction and give it a capital T.

In your example, where the noun path is the object of the preposition than, you’d use lowercase for the latter:

“There Is More than One Path to a Successful Meal”

But in the following example, where than is followed by a clause and is therefore a conjunction, you’d apply a capital T:

“A Successful Meal Requires More Than I Bargained For”

It might be easier to make an exception and capitalize than even when it’s acting as a preposition rather than as a conjunction (see CMOS 5.189 for an explanation of how these two uses differ). But until that dream becomes a reality (19th edition, maybe?), you’ll need to figure out the grammar before deciding what to do.

Q. Why do we not use commas when writing years? What will happen in the year 10000?? I’m very concerned.

A. You have nothing to fear: Though commas are omitted from years that include no more than four digits, they’re recommended for years that run to five digits or more. So about eight thousand years from now (or just under 7,975 years as of April 2025)—when the year 9999 will have turned into 10,000 (as in 10,000 CE, or AD 10,000 if you prefer)—you can start adding commas to years to help you keep track of all those digits.

We don’t know why commas are omitted from four-digit years. But check back with us once commas are required again for everyday use. Maybe by then CMOS will have grown to more than 10,000 pages. If so—and assuming it’s still published in print and fits in a single volume (or two or more consecutively paginated volumes)—you should be able to turn to page 10000 or later to find out whether we’re still omitting commas from five-digit page numbers.

For more on years (including abbreviations like AD and CE), start with CMOS 9.36; for page numbers, see 9.63. For spelling out numbers versus using digits, start with 9.1.

Q. How should one handle mentions of questions, rather than direct expressions of them? As an example, consider this sentence: The question “What is dark energy?” has been a major focus of cosmology for decades. Should there be a comma after “question”? Should the question be set within quotation marks? Should it instead be set in italics? Is there some other format that Chicago would recommend?

A. When a question occurs within another sentence—but not as a form of direct discourse introduced with a verb like asked or wondered—it can usually be treated like any other noun. Whether to use a comma in your example will depend, then, on whether the question itself is restrictive or nonrestrictrive relative to the word question.

If you don’t know what that means, consider these two sentences (and see CMOS 6.30):

The artist Frida Kahlo has been a major focus of self-portraiture studies for decades.

The question What is dark energy? has been a major focus of cosmology for decades.

Just as “Frida Kahlo” is essential to the meaning of the word artist in the first sentence, “What is dark energy?” is essential to the meaning of the word question in the second. In other words, the name and the question are both restrictive, so no commas are needed in either sentence.

If the artist or question has already been introduced, or if either one is preceded by a limiting adjective like this (see also CMOS 5.72)—or if both are true—those same elements become nonrestrictive and are set off by commas. For example:

We were discussing a question that, to date, has no definitive answer. This question, What is dark energy?, has been a major focus of cosmology for decades.

Quotation marks are usually unnecessary for such questions unless you’re quoting someone or something directly. And though italics can be helpful, they aren’t usually necessary either. For the use of a comma following a question mark (which you could avoid in the example above by using dashes or parentheses instead), see CMOS 6.134. For commas with direct questions (with asked or the like), see 6.45.

Q. A paper includes the following references:

Tawiah, Vincent, Ernest Gyapong, and Muhammad Usman. 2024. “Returnee Directors and Green Innovation.” Journal of Business Research 174 (March): 114369.

Tawiah, Vincent, Ernest Gyapong, and Yan Wang. 2024. “Does Board Ethnic Diversity Affect IFRS Disclosures?” Journal of Accounting Literature, ahead of print, September 24.

Tawiah, Vincent, Reon Matemane, Babajide Oyewo, and Tesfaye T. Lemma. 2024. “Saving the Environment with Indigenous Directors: Evidence from Africa.” Business Strategy and the Environment 33 (3): 2445–61.

Tawiah, Vincent, Abdulrasheed Zakari, and Rafael Alvarado. 2024. “Effect of Corruption on Green Growth.” Environment, Development and Sustainability 26 (4): 10429–59.

Should I still cite the first two references in the text as first author, second author, et al. YEAR (e.g., Tawiah, Gyapong, et al. 2024), even though only one author is not mentioned and so “et al.” doesn’t seem appropriate?

A. It would be nice if et al. (a Latin abbreviation meaning “and others”) could be used to refer to just one person, but it’s plural, and there’s no suitable alternative abbreviation for the singular.

In your situation—where you are obligated to include more than one name in your parenthetical author-date text references to distinguish between different works published in the same year by the same first-listed author but with different coauthors (otherwise, “Tawiah et al.” would suffice)—you have no choice but to include all three authors when citing any of the three sources by exactly three authors.

But you can still use et al. for the source by four authors (the article in Business Strategy and the Environment), where it would stand in for the names of the third and fourth authors (Oyewo and Lemma):

(Tawiah, Gyapong, and Usman 2024)

(Tawiah, Gyapong, and Wang 2024)

(Tawiah, Zakari, and Alvarado 2024)

but

(Tawiah, Matemane, et al. 2024)

Note that you’d need to list all three authors for the first two examples no matter what—because the first two authors are the same for both. It’s the third example (with coauthors Zakari and Alvarado) that requires all three names simply because et al. must refer to more than one person.

For some additional considerations (including the option to use a short title to differentiate such sources in text references, which would allow you to cite “Tawiah et al.” for all four of your sources), see CMOS 13.123. For the article ID in place of page numbers in the “Returnee Directors” citation, see CMOS 14.71. For the meaning of “ahead of print” in the Accounting Literature example, see CMOS 14.75.

Q. When citing an endnote, should the page number be the page the note callout appears on or the page where the endnote is at the end of the book (24n5 vs. 385n5)?

A. Footnote or endnote, you’re citing the note itself, not its reference number in the text. For an endnote, the page number to cite is the one at the end of the book where the note can be found (or 385n5 in your example).

This does mean that readers who follow the citation to its source will need to track down the note reference in the text if they want to see the context for that note, but endnotes are almost always less user-friendly than footnotes (unless the notes are linked, as in an ebook).

Q. What is Chicago style for elongated words: huuuuge or h-u-u-u-u-ge? Thank you.

A. Chicago doesn’t have a style for such words. But maybe you’ve noticed that some people write, for example, likeeee or cuteeee. Those texting-era spellings don’t make much sense when spoken: Which part is drawn out, the final consonant or the eeee? Within a text, however, they suggest that the writer is using the last letter as an exclamation point, tapping it repeatedly for emphasis or to show enthusiasm. Hyphens would ruin this effect (cute-e-e-e?).

You could point then to texting as a precedent and repeat the letter u (as in your first version, huuuuge). It’s cleaner on the page (or screen) than the one with all the hyphens, and the intended pronunciation is obvious. Or you could go with hugeeee—but only if your goal is to use (or to mimic) the textspeak repetition of the final letter noted above. Then the e’s at the end might seem normal (That’s hugeeee!!!).

For the use of hyphens to suggest stuttering, see CMOS 12.44.

Q. How many spaces should you leave between a bullet and an item in a vertical list?

A. In Microsoft Word and Google Docs, the default setting for a bulleted list applies a hanging indent of 0.25 inches. This means that the bullet is a quarter inch to the left of the text. A similar indent value can be used for typeset text in Adobe Illustrator or the like. Here’s what the HTML editor for this Q&A does by default:

• This is the first item in a bulleted list.
• This is the second item. It’s long enough that it should spill over to the next line in practically any program you might use to view this page.
• This is the third and last item in the list.

But don’t type actual spaces after a bullet (i.e., using the space bar). It’s better to use the list option in whatever program you’re using, which should apply a fixed amount of space after each bullet to create the hanging indent.

But if you create the list manually—for example, by inserting a bullet character followed by a tab (or what Word and Docs do automatically)—you’ll need to apply a hanging indent also. Whichever method you use, the size of the hanging indent can be adjusted to suit your preferences. For some additional considerations, see CMOS 2.25.

Q. Which is preferred, (n + 1)st or (n + 1)th?

A. An argument can be made for either, and they are both relatively common, as this extensive thread at Stack Exchange’s English Language & Usage forum suggests. If you need a source to back up one choice or the other, a user named Mitch found one: Handbook of Writing for the Mathematical Sciences, by Nicholas J. Higham (2nd ed., Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 1998).

Higham’s book says that the ordinal suffix depends on the number rather than on the variable—as in (k + 1)st, (k + 2)nd, (k + 3)rd, (k + 4)th, and so on (see section 5.5, p. 63). Any variable alone would use th (kth), because k is equivalent to (k + 0), and the ordinal for zero is zeroth.

As that same Stack Exchange thread points out, some sources use a hyphen before the ordinal ending: (k + 1)-st. The thread also suggests that a preference for th treats k + 1 as a variation on kth, whereas st favors pronunciation (as in “kay plus first”).

Or see the Encyclopedia of Mathematics (European Mathematical Society, 2002), available online at https://encyclopediaofmath.org/. Usage there varies, from (n + 1)th (under “Markov braid theorem”) and (n − 1)-th (“Fredholm equation”) to (n + 1)st (“Zipf law”) and (n − 1)-st (“Weyl method”). (Other variables, including k, follow a similar pattern.) But the st variations (with or without a hyphen) seem to be more common than the ones with th, lending support to Higham’s recommendation.

Verdict? (n + 1)st, barring a strong author or publisher preference for th.

Q. I’m in the middle of working with a client on a white paper that has citations to articles found on government agency websites (e.g., Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health, Office of Disease Prevention). The writing is completed, we’re in the layout/​production stage, and while checking links and confirming URLs in the endnotes, we’re finding that articles and pages that had been referenced in our endnotes have now been removed from the government websites in accordance with the administration’s recent orders. How do we reference reports and articles that are significant but have been removed?

A. Whenever you find a dead link (or a link that works but points to a different version of the cited content), you have a few options, which are the same regardless of why the link no longer works as intended:

1. If the cited page can’t be found anywhere, and the author didn’t save a copy, then you can either (a) add “(page no longer available)” or similar wording after the URL (as shown at CMOS 14.104), or (b) ask the author to revise the text and citation to fix the problem (perhaps by referring to and citing a different document). Option a should be used only as a last resort.
2. If the author did save a copy, you can add that fact to the notice suggested for option a above: “(page no longer available; copy of original in author’s possession).” Option 1b may still be preferable unless the cited document is crucial to the author’s paper.
3. If you can track down an archived version of the page—for example, at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine—you can cite that (after making sure that any text that relies on that page, including any direct quotations, remains accurate).

Option 3 is usually best, assuming the content has been archived in a way that allows others to consult it. For example, consider the following URL, which as of March 4, 2025, results in a “Page Not Found” notice:

https://www.cdc.gov/healthcommunication/Health_Equity.html

If you paste that URL into the Wayback Machine, you’ll find dozens of archived versions (or snapshots) dating back to August 25, 2021. Here’s how we’d cite one of those versions, following the recommendations at CMOS 14.104 (and using the “last reviewed” date reported at the bottom of that page in lieu of a publication date; see CMOS 13.16):

1. “Health Equity Guiding Principles for Inclusive Communication,” Gateway to Health Communication, CDC, last reviewed August 11, 2023, archived July 24, 2024, at https://​web​.archive​.org​/web​/20240724​170713​/https://​www​.cdc​.gov​/health​communication​/Health​_Equity.html.

If you can’t find the page at the Wayback Machine or anywhere else, you’re back to options 1 and 2 at the beginning of this answer.

Links break for many reasons, but there are some basic precautions that authors can take to prevent the scenario described in the question above from happening in the first place:

• First, always save a copy of any web page (including any PDFs) that you consult as you do your research (e.g., as a screenshot or as an HTML or PDF file). Zotero and other citation managers can help with this task. See also CMOS 13.13 and 13.17.
• Second, don’t assume that a page will have been archived by someone else (as was the case for the CDC.gov URL in the example above). Instead, create your own archived version if you can—for example, by pasting the URL into the Save Page Now feature at the Wayback Machine. This won’t always be an option (some content will be blocked from being archived), but at least you’ll have your own personal copy to point to (see previous bullet) if anyone challenges your research.

Copyeditors can help by alerting authors to any page that may need to be archived or saved in one of the ways described above—and by editing citations accordingly. That should keep everyone, including readers, on the same page.

Q. Good morning! We’re wondering what to do with the word “but” on the front cover of our newest release: “Present, but Not Counted.” Is it acceptable to cap “But” on the front cover because it looks better than a lowercase “but”? The title in the running heads is in small caps, so no issue there. Citations and references to this title would of course use a lowercase b, but is there a rule about cover text? Or do we have some liberty? Thank you very much.

A. You have some liberty. As your question suggests, the rules in CMOS for capitalizing titles of works apply only to titles that are mentioned or cited in text, notes, bibliographies, and so on. So you can go ahead and put But instead of but on the cover—and on the title page if you prefer. In both places, design takes precedence over the style for text.

But you don’t need to throw out the rules entirely. Instead, you can use the design rather than capitalization alone to de-emphasize words (like but) that would normally be lowercase in a title.

For example, the cover of the 2022 memoir by musician William “Billy Boy” Arnold (written with Kim Field and published by the University of Chicago Press) features all caps for the title words except for of, which is lowercase and italic (and in a different font and lighter color):

When mentioned or cited, that would be The Blues Dream of Billy Boy Arnold, not THE BLUES DREAM of BILLY BOY ARNOLD.