Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles of works

"MOS:TITLE" redirects here. Not to be confused with Wikipedia:Article titles at MOS:TITLES or WP:TITLE.

This part of the Manual of Style covers the format or style used for titles of things, such as whether the title is placed in italics or quotation marks. For the policy on what a title should be, i.e. the name chosen to indicate what an article is about and to distinguish it from other articles, see Wikipedia:Article titles.

Italics

See also: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Text formatting §Italic face

Italic type (text like this) is generally used for the following categories of titles:

• Certain scientific names
  • Genes (but not proteins encoded by genes)
  • Genus and all lower taxa (including species and subspecies), but not higher taxa. The entire scientific name should be italicized, except where an author, "cf.", or some other interpolation is included in or appended to the name. (See WP:MOSTEXT §Scientific names for details.)
• Court case names (Case citation or law report information is presented in normal font.)
• Named vehicles
  • Ship classes—only when the class takes its name from a member of the class: USS Gearing (DD-710) is the lead ship of the Gearing class (See WP:SHIPMOS §Referring to ship classes)
  • Ship names—ship prefixes, classification symbols, and pennant numbers use normal font: USS Gearing (DD-710) (See WP:SHIPMOS §Referring to ships)
  • Trains and locomotives
• Works of art and artifice
  • Books (and pamphlets)
  • Cantatas and motets
  • Comic strips and webcomics
  • Computer and video games (but not other software)
  • Films (including short films) and documentaries
  • Long or epic poems
  • Media franchises (including series of books, comics, games, videos, and other releases)
  • Musical albums
  • Musicals
  • Named exhibitions (artistic, historical, scientific, educational, cultural, literary, etc.)
  • Named orchestral works: Symphony No. 2 by Gustav Mahler, known as the Resurrection Symphony ...
  • Operas, operettas, oratorios
  • Paintings, sculptures and other works of visual art
  • Periodicals (newspapers, journals, and magazines)
  • Plays
  • Television and radio series and serials (but individual episodes should appear in quotes)

Abbreviations of the above should also be italicized.

Website titles may or may not be italicized depending on the type of site and what kind of content it features. Online magazines, newspapers, and news sites with original content should generally be italicized (Salon.com or The Huffington Post). Online encyclopedias and dictionaries should also be italicized (Scholarpedia or Merriam-Webster Online). Other types of websites should be decided on a case-by-case basis.

Examples

To display text in italics, enclose it in double apostrophes.

• The New York Times is produced by ''The New York Times''.
• The Mary Tyler Moore Show is produced by ''[[The Mary Tyler Moore Show]]''.

If the title is also a wikilink but only part of it should be italicized, use a piped link to properly display the title.

• Casablanca is produced by ''[[Casablanca (film)|Casablanca]]'' or [[Casablanca (film)|''Casablanca'']].

Without piping, this wikilink would display—and incorrectly italicize—the disambiguation term, which is not part of the film title.

• USS Toledo (CA-133) is produced by [[USS Toledo (CA-133)|USS ''Toledo'' (CA-133)]].

Ship and locomotive names are italicized, but prefixes and ID numbers are not. For ship names, see WP:SHIPMOS §Referring to ships

• Baltimore-class cruiser is produced by [[Baltimore class cruiser|''Baltimore''-class cruiser]].

Ship class names are often italicized, but ship types are not. For further information, see WP:SHIPMOS §Referring to ship classes.

If the title of a Wikipedia article requires italicization (see WP:ITALICTITLE):

• place {{Italic title}} at the top of the page to italicize the whole title
• use the Template:Wikivar magic word for more nuanced titles (See Wikipedia:Page name §Changing the displayed title)

Quotation marks

Italics are generally used only for titles of longer works. Titles of shorter works should be enclosed in double quotation marks ("text like this"). It particularly applies to works that exist as a smaller part of a larger work. Examples of titles which are quoted:

• Articles, essays or papers
• Chapters of a longer work
• Entries in a longer work (dictionary, encyclopedia, etc.)
• Single episodes of a television series or Web-distributed video series
• Single named story lines in comic books or graphic novels
• Short poems
• Short stories
• Songs and singles
• Speeches and lectures, where the speaker has titled the speech, or that use a speech line as a title

Additional markup

If a title is enclosed in quotation marks, do not include the quotation marks in any additional formatting markup. For example, if a title in quotation marks is the subject of a Wikipedia article and therefore displayed in boldface in the lead section, the quotation marks should not be in boldface because they are not part of the title itself. For further information, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style – Punctuation.

Examples

• "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
• "Goober and Gomer Change a Tire"
• "Do's and Don'ts of Dating"
• "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"
• "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and "She's Leaving Home" appear on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
• "The Germans" is an episode of the television programme Fawlty Towers
• "I Have a Dream" speech

Neither

There are a few cases in which the title should be in neither italics nor quotation marks:

• Scriptures of large, well-known religions (see details below)
• Legal or constitutional documents (example: Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms)
• Traditional games (example: hopscotch)
• Software other than games (example: iTunes)
• Commercial products other than media works (example: Cheerios)
• World's fairs and other large-scale exhibitions, which are capitalized
• Speech names that aren't actual titles. Example: State of the Union address, Checkers speech

Scripture

Scriptures of large, well-known religions should not normally be italicized. For example, the Bible, the Quran, the Talmud, the Bhagavad Gita, the Adi Granth, the Book of Mormon, and the Avesta are not italicized. Their constituent parts, such as the Book of Ruth, the New Testament or the Gospel of Matthew are not italicized either, as such titles are generally conjectural rather than original ones. However, the titles of specific published versions of sacred texts should be italicized, such as the Authorized King James Version or the New Edition of the Babylonian Talmud. Many relatively obscure sacred texts are also generally italicized, particularly if the work is not likely to be well-known to the Wikipedia reader, if the work was first published in modern times and has not undergone substantial changes, or if it might be unclear that the title refers to a book. For example, The Urantia Book, The Satanic Bible, and Divine Principle should be italicized. Norse pagan scriptures, such as Gylfaginning, are also italicized.

Punctuation

Place adjacent punctuation outside any italics or quotation marks unless the punctuation is part of the title itself.

• Johnson spoke often of Huckleberry Finn, his favorite novel. – The comma is not part of the title and therefore is not italicized.
• George Orwell's well-known essay, "Politics and the English Language", condemned the hypocrisy endemic in political writing and speech. – The commas are not part of the title and are therefore outside the quotation marks.
• O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a 2000 adventure film. – The comma and question mark are both part of the title and are therefore italicized.

Capitalization

Main article: MOS:CT

In alphabetic languages besides English though not necessarily all besides, and like the names of sections in Wikipedia articles and pages, generally only the first word and all proper nouns are capitalized in titles, which relieves considerable ambiguity as to the nature of the nouns appearing in a title. Note: with German, all nouns are to be capitalized in general, that is, regardless of being in a sentence, phrase or title.

With English, on the other hand; every word except for articles, short coordinating conjunctions and short prepositions are capitalized, unless the word is the first or last within the title.