Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles of works

For complete guidance on the handling of titles of works, see further detail at the following pages (until the material is better consolidated):

• WP:Article titles (WP:TITLE, WP:TITLES) 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
• WP:Manual of Style § Titles of works (which summarizes the key points)
• WP:Manual of Style § Italics §§ Titles, and WP:Manual of Style/Text formatting § Names and titles (both summarize details provided on the page below)
• WP:Manual of Style § Punctuation §§ Quotation marks §§§ Names and titles (summarizes details provided on the page below)
• WP:Manual of Style/Lists of works
• WP:Manual of Style/Music § Capitalization

This part of the Manual of Style covers title formats and style for works of art or artifice, such as capitalization and italics versus quotation marks.

Italics

See also: Wikipedia:Article titles § Italics and other formatting, and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Text formatting § Italic face

Italic type (text like this, marked up with pairs of apostrophes as ''text like this'') should be used for the following types of names and titles, or abbreviations thereof:

Major works

• Officially named series of major works: The Lord of the Rings film series (see § Series titles below)
• Audio albums (musical or spoken-word)
• Non-generic names of major independent compositions (see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (music) § Definitions – italics for more detail):
  • Musicals, operas, operettas and other self-contained pieces of musical theatre
  • Named oratorios, cantatas, motets, orchestral works, and other compositions beyond the scope of a single song or dance:
    • Symphony No. 2 by Gustav Mahler, known as the Resurrection Symphony ... (generic vs. non-generic name)
    • Stravinsky's Cantata is a work for soprano, tenor, female choir, and instrumental ensemble ... (unnamed cantata)
    • On an Overgrown Path (Czech: Po zarostlém chodníčku) is a cycle of thirteen piano pieces written by Leoš Janáček ... (named piano composition)
• Books, multi-volume works (e.g. encyclopedias), and booklets
• Television and radio programs, specials, shows, series and serials
• Films (including short films) and documentaries
• Comic books, comic strips, graphic novels and manga
• Video games, board games, trading card games
• Court case names, but not case citation or law report details included with the case name: Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)
• Named exhibitions (artistic, historical, scientific, educational, cultural, literary, etc. – generally hosted by, or part of, an existing institution such as a museum or gallery), but not large-scale exhibition events or individual exhibits
• Paintings, sculptures and other works of visual art with a title rather than a name (see MOS:VATITLE for more detail)
• Periodicals (newspapers, journals, magazines)
• Plays (including published screenplays and teleplays)
• Long or epic poems
• Syndicated columns and other features republished regularly by others

The actual medium of publication or presentation is not a factor; a video feature only released on video tape, disc or the Internet is considered a "film" for these purposes, and likewise an e-book is a book, a webcomic is a comic strip, a music album only available from the artist on a limited-edition USB drive is a real album, a TV series only available via streaming services is still a series, etc.

Minor works (any specifically titled subdivisions of italicized major works) are given in quotation marks (See Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Text formatting § When not to use italics for details).

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 or HuffPost). Online non-user-generated 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.

These cases are well-established conventions recognized in most style guides. Do not apply italics to other categories or instances because you feel they are creative or artful (e.g. game or sport moves, logical arguments, "artisanal" products, schools of practice or thought, Internet memes, aphorisms etc.).

When any website is cited as a source, it is necessarily being treated as a publication, and in that context takes italics. Our citation templates do this automatically; do not abuse unrelated citation parameters, such as |publisher=, to evade italicization of online work titles in source citations.

Similar cases

Some similar cases that are not titles of works include:

• Certain scientific names: named genes (but not proteins encoded by them); genus and a lower taxon (e.g. species and subspecies), but not higher taxa (See WP:Manual of Style/Text formatting § Scientific names for details)
• Specific, named transportation vehicles (but not prefixes, classifications, identifying numbers or other designations for them), including ships, spacecraft, trains, and locomotives (but not smaller conveyances such as cars or buses). Example: USS Baltimore (CA-68), the lead ship of the Baltimore-class cruisers (See WP:Manual of Style/Text formatting § Vessels for details)

Link formatting

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

• The Mary Tyler Moore Show is produced by italicizing around (not inside) the link: ''[[The Mary Tyler Moore Show]]''.

If the title is also a wikilink but only part of it should be italicized, use italics around or inside 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.

Italicizing Wikipedia article titles

Further information: Wikipedia:Article titles § Italics and other formatting

If the title of a Wikipedia article requires italicization, there are two options:

• Place {{Italic title}} at the top of the page to italicize the part of the title before the first parenthesis, as at Casablanca (film).
• Use the {{DISPLAYTITLE}} magic word for more nuanced titles, as at List of Sex and the City episodes and USS Baltimore (CA-68) (see WP:Page name § Changing the displayed title for technical details). Some wikiprojects may provide special templates for this, and some infoboxes (e.g. {{Infobox film}}) automatically italicize the article titles.

Quotation marks

This section is about use of quotation marks in titles of works of art or artifice. For use of quotation marks generally, see WP:Manual of Style § Quotation marks.

Minor works

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 but not italicized:

• Articles, essays, papers, or conference presentation notes (stand-alone or in a collected larger work): "The Dos and Don'ts of Dating Online" is an article by Phil McGraw on his advice site.
• Chapters of a longer work (they may be labeled alternatively, e.g. sections, parts, or "books" within an actual book, etc.)
• Entries in a reference work (dictionary, encyclopedia, etc.)
• Single episodes or plot arcs of a television series or other serial audio-visual program: "The Germans" is an episode of the television programme Fawlty Towers
• Exhibits (specific) within a larger exhibition
• Leaflets, flyers, circulars, brochures, postcards, instruction sheets, and other ephemeral publications
• Sections within a periodical, including features, departments, columns (non-syndicated), titled cartoons (not syndicated comic strips)
• Segments of a play, film, television show, etc., including named acts, skits, scenes, and the like
• Short poems: "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost
• Short stories (textual or graphic): "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce
• Story lines that span multiple issues of a periodical
• Songs, instrumentals, arias, numbers in a musical, movements of longer musical piece, album tracks, singles, and other short musical compositions: The Beatles' song "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" appears on the album also titled Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
• Speeches, lectures, and conference presentations (only if given a specific title)

This convention also applies to songs, speeches, manuscripts, etc., with no known formal titles but which are conventionally referred to by lines from them as if they were titles: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

The formatting of the title of a pamphlet, which is on the divide between a booklet or short book on the one hand and a leaflet or brochure on the other – specifically, whether to italicize the title or place it within quotation marks – is left to editorial discretion at the article in question. Anything that has been assigned an ISBN or ISSN should be italicized. Another rule of thumb is that if the work is intended to stand alone and to be kept for later reference, or is likely to be seen as having merit as a stand-alone work, italicize it. Use quotation marks if the item is entirely ephemeral, trivial, or simply promotional of some other work or product.

The convention of italicizing non-English words and phrases does not apply to proper names; thus, a title of a short non-English work simply receives quotation marks.

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.

Titles in quotation marks that include (or in unusual cases consist of) something that requires italicization for some other reason than being a title, e.g. a genus and species name, or a foreign-language phrase, or the name of a larger work being referred to, also use the needed italicization, inside the quotation marks: "Ferromagnetic Material in the Eastern Red-spotted Newt Notophthalmus viridescens" (an academic journal article containing an italicized phrase), and "Ich Bin Ein Auslander" (a song with a German-language title).

Neither

There are cases in which the title should be in neither italics nor quotation marks (though many are capitalized):

• Scripture of large, well-known religions (see details at § Scripture, below)
• Legal or constitutional documents: temporary restraining order, Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Bill of Rights
• Descriptive titles: a reference to or description of a work or part of a work when not using its actual or conventional title: 137th graduation address, conference keynote speech, an introductory aria, Satie's furniture music, State of the Union address, Nixon's Checkers speech; also: the season finale of Game of Thrones, not the "Season Finale" of Game of Thrones (for media franchises such as series of books, films, etc., see § Series titles below)
• Traditional games (including sports): hopscotch, blackjack, rugby football, American football
• Software other than games: iTunes, traceroute, Sobig
• Commercial products other than media works Cheerios, Toyota Sportivo Coupe, Silly Putty
• World's fairs and other large-scale exhibition events (e.g. with their own grounds and spanning more than one building), and concerts or other large media events: Expo 2010, Cannes Film Festival, Burning Man, Lollapalooza
• Works named by a generic title: Symphony No. 2 by Gustav Mahler ..., Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 ..., The Magnificat by Schütz, ... the Adagio sometimes attributed to Albinoni
• Smaller parts of larger works when they are simply numbered sequentially, and the title appears that way in the work (or a preponderance of reliable sources about the work): To Kill a Mockingbird, Part One, Chapter 1
• Names (not to be confused with titles) of some works of art such as illuminated manuscripts: the Vienna Dioscorides (which is a copy of De Materia Medica by Dioscorides)
• Names of well-known archaeological artifacts: the Rosetta Stone
• Names of buildings

Scripture

See also: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters § Religions, deities, philosophies, doctrines and their adherents

Scriptures of large, well-known religions should not normally be italicized. For example, Bible, Quran, Talmud, Bhagavad Gita, Adi Granth, Book of Mormon, and Avesta are not italicized. Their constituent parts, such as Book of Ruth, New Testament, or Gospel of Matthew are not italicized either, as such titles are generally traditional 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, Divine Principle, and Gylfaginning should be italicized.

Series titles

Descriptive titles for media franchises and fictional universes (including trilogies and other series of novels or films) should not be placed in italics or quotation marks, even when based on a character or feature of the works (Tolkien's Middle-earth writings, the Marvel and DC universes in comics, Sherlock Holmes mysteries). However, the following should be set in italics:

• Actual titles of a series declared by the author or publisher (Les Rougon-Macquart, The Chronicles of Narnia)
• The name of an individual work within the series name (The Star Wars franchise named for the Star Wars film, The Three Colors trilogy named for films with the prefix Three Colours).

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 comedic film. – The comma and question mark are both part of the title and are therefore italicized.

Where subtitle punctuation is unclear (e.g. because the subtitle is given on a separate line on the cover or a poster), use a colon and a space, not a dash, comma, or other punctuation, to separate the title elements. If there are two subtitles, a dash can be used between the second and third elements.

Capital letters

For capitalization in Wikipedia article titles, see Wikipedia:Naming conventions (capitalization).

In titles of English-language works, every word except for definite and indefinite articles, short coordinating conjunctions, and short prepositions is capitalized (including subtitles, if any). This is known as title case. Capitalization of non-English titles varies by language (see below).

Wikipedia normally follows these conventions when referring to such works, whether in the name of an article or within the text. For other article titles, Wikipedia uses sentence case. In sentence case, generally only the first word and all proper names are capitalized (this is also true of section headings, captions, etc.). Examples: List of selection theorems, Women's rights in Haiti.

WP:Citing sources § Citation style permits the use of pre-defined, off-Wikipedia citation styles within Wikipedia, and some of these expect sentence case for certain titles (usually article and chapter titles). Title case should not be imposed on such titles under such a citation style when that style is the one consistently used in an article.

Always capitalized: When using title case, the following words should be capitalized:

• The first and last word of the title
• Every adjective, adverb, noun, pronoun, and subordinating conjunction (Me, It, His, If, etc.)
• Every verb, including forms of to be (Be, Am, Is, Are, Was, Were, Been)
• Prepositions that contain five letters or more (During, Through, About, Until, Below, Under, etc.) – the "five-letter rule"
• Words that have the same form as prepositions, but are not being used specifically as prepositions
  • Particles of phrasal verbs(e.g. Give Up the Ghost, "Puttin' On the Ritz")
  • The first word in a compound preposition (e.g. Time Out of Mind)

Not capitalized: For title case, the words that are not capitalized on Wikipedia (unless they are the first or last word of a title) are:

• Indefinite and definite articles (a, an, the)
• Short coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, nor ; also for, yet, so when used as conjunctions)
• Prepositions containing four letters or fewer (as, in, of, on, to, for, from, into, like, over, with, upon, etc.); but see above for instances where these words are not used as prepositions
• The word to in infinitives.

Other styles exist with regard to prepositions, including three- or even two-letter rules in news and entertainment journalism, and capitalization of no prepositions at all at many academic publishers. These styles are not used on Wikipedia, including for titles of pop-culture or academic works.

Potential exceptions: Apply our five-letter rule (above) for prepositions except when a significant majority of current, reliable sources that are independent of the subject consistently capitalize, in the title of a specific work, a word that is frequently not a preposition, as in "Like" and "Past". Continue to lower-case common four-letter (or shorter) prepositions like "into" and "from".

Hyphenation: The general rule in English to not capitalize after a hyphen unless what follows the hyphen is itself a proper name (as in post-Soviet) is often ignored in titles of works. Follow the majority usage in independent, reliable sources for any given subject (e.g. The Out-of-Towners but The History of Middle-earth). If neither spelling is clearly dominant in sources, default to lowercase after a hyphen, per the general rule.

Subtitles: Not everything in parentheses (round brackets) is a subtitle. For titles with subtitles or parenthetical phrases, capitalize the first word of each element, even if it would not normally be capitalized, if the element is either:

• a clause that can stand alone as a title and is sometimes used that way, as a short name: "(Now and Then There's) A Fool Such as I"
• a clearly separate or alternative title, expansion, or descriptive phrase, given in parentheses or following a colon or dash: "Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)", "Linking Albinism and Immunity: The Secrets of Secretory Lysosomes", Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Do not capitalize a normally lower-cased word:

• in a dependent clause that does not begin the title and is not used as a stand-alone title: "Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)"
• after a comma: The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

Incipits: If a work is known by its first line or few words of text (its incipit), this is rendered in sentence case, and will often be the Wikipedia article title. Examples:

• Remember not, Lord, our offences, a musical setting of excerpted passage from a liturgical text
• "An act to enforce the 15th amendment to the Constitution of the United States", the beginning of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and sometimes used as a long name for it; legal incipits are often originally published in all-capitals.

Capitalization in foreign-language titles varies, even over time within the same language. Retain the style of the original for modern works. For historical works, follow the dominant usage in modern, English-language, reliable sources.

• Correct: Les Liaisons dangereuses (French; the English title is Dangerous Liaisons)
• Correct: El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (Spanish; the English title is The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, or Don Quixote for short)
• Correct: "Hymnus an den heiligen Geist" (German; there is no English title, though it translates as "Hymn to the Holy Ghost")

Non-English titles should be wrapped in the {{lang}} template (inside surrounding italics or quotation marks), with the proper language code, e.g.: "{{lang|de|Hymnus an den heiligen Geist}}".

Indefinite and definite articles

A leading A, An, or The is preserved in the title of a work, including when preceded by a possessive or other construction that would eliminate the article in something other than a title, e.g.: Stephen King's The Stand; however, the is sometimes not part of the title itself, e.g.: the Odyssey, the Los Angeles Times but The New York Times.

The leading article may be dropped when the title is used as a modifier: According to a New York Times article by ....

An indefinite or definite article is capitalized only when at the start of a title, subtitle, or embedded title or subtitle. For example, a book chapter titled "An Examination of The Americans: The Anachronisms in FX's Period Spy Drama" contains three capitalized leading articles (main title, embedded title, and subtitle).

Translations

For works originally named in languages other than English, use WP:COMMONNAME to determine whether the original title or an English language version should be used as the article title. For works best known by their title in a language other than English, an English translation of that title may be helpful. If the work is also well known by an English title, give the English translation in parentheses following normal formatting for titles: Les Liaisons dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons). Where the work is not known by an English title, give the translation in parentheses without special formatting in sentence case: Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen (Weeping, lamenting, worrying, fearing). In references, square brackets are used: Il Giornale dell'Architettura [The journal of architecture].

Typographic effects

Main page: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Trademarks

Do not attempt (with HTML, Unicode, wikimarkup, inline images, or any other method) to emulate any purely typographic effects used in titles when giving the title in Wikipedia, though an article on a work may also include a note about how it is often styled, e.g. in marketing materials. When giving such a stylization, it is not italicized or placed in quotation marks as a title; this confuses readers, who are apt to think such markup is part of the stylization when it is not.

• Right: Alien 3 (stylized as ALIEN³) is a 1992 American science-fiction horror film.
• Wrong: ALIEN³ initially received mixed reviews from critics.

For typographic effects that do not represent actual mathematical or scientific usage, it is preferable to use HTML or wiki markup, not Unicode equivalents, for superscript and subscript. When giving a stylization, do not attempt to mimic specific fonts, font size quirks, uneven letter placement, coloration, letters replaced with images, unusual upper- or lower-casing, or other visual marketing (see WP:Manual of Style/Trademarks, WP:Manual of Style/Capital letters).

If a stylization that readers might look for can be created as an article title, redirect it to the actual article, and include {{R from stylization}} on the redirect page: ALIEN³.

Semantic markup and special characters in titles should be preserved when they convey meaning not just decoration, especially if omitting them would make the title difficult to understand or cause it to not copy-paste correctly. Examples:

• According to section 4.5.28, "The span element", in HTML 5.2: W3C Recommendation
  This should not be done for titles inside Citation Style 1 and Citation Style 2 templates, however, as it will negatively affect COinS metadata output.

Quotation marks simply used as a form of title stylization on a cover are removed. They are retained within a title when reliable sourcing demonstrates they indicate an actual quotation, or sarcasm. If the title is put into double quotation marks as a minor work, its interior quotation marks are rendered as single quotes. When giving a quoted title that begins or ends with an interior quotation mark, the templates {{"'}} and {{'"}}, respectively, can be used to kern the double and single quotation marks apart for better readability; this should not be done inside citation templates, just in running prose. Interior quotation marks in an italicized title go within the italics.

Typographic conformity

Main page: Wikipedia:Manual of Style § Typographic conformity

Generally, the guidelines on typographic conformity in quoted material also apply to titles of works, including normalization of dashes and quotation marks, conversion of various emphasis techniques, cleanup of punctuation, and use of italics for things like scientific names of species.

Some special considerations:

• Inside a citation template, do not use formatting templates like {{em}} or {{lang}}, or raw HTML markup like <em>...</em>, in the titles of the work, author(s) names, or any of the other parameters in which extended markup should be avoided. Using such code in them pollutes the COinS metadata emitted by the templates, for use with reference management software. To italicize or boldface something in a title, use basic wikimarkup, e.g.: {{Cite journal |title=Gray wolf (''Canis lupus'') is a natural definitive host for ''Neospora caninum'' |date=...}}. It will be filtered out of the COinS metadata, as will wikilinks, but most other markup will not be.
• Boldfaced, all-caps, or otherwise stylized titles in source material are not interpreted as a form of emphasis; a particular specially-treated word within a title may well be. In such a case, convert to <em>...</em> or {{em}} markup, or to ''...'' inside a citation template.
• Titles of works that should be italicized receive this treatment inside another title. E.g., convert a newspaper title like "Ben Daniels Joins Cast of 'The Crown' for Season Three" to "Ben Daniels Joins Cast of The Crown for Season Three".
• Abbreviations in titles of works should be left as-is, and do not need any linking or markup; if the abbreviation is contextually important, it should be treated in the main article prose.

Abbreviation of long titles

Main page: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Abbreviations

When it is impractical to keep repeating a long title in the same article, it is permissible to use a source-attested abbreviation of it. This is can be introduced in parentheses, with or without a parenthetical "hereafter", at an early occurrence in the page: "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" (hereafter "ITEOTWAWKI"). Some other examples include OED for The Oxford English Dictionary, LotR for The Lord of the Rings, and STII:TWoK for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. It is not necessary to use camel case, as in LotR, unless most of the reliable sources prefer such a spelling. Such an abbreviation need not be mentioned in the lead section of the article unless the work is very commonly known by the abbreviation (e.g., GTA for the Grand Theft Auto video game series), or the lead is long and the abbreviation is needed in the lead.

A common convention in literary and film reviews is to use the first major word or two from the title (or subtitle, for franchise works) in the same manner, e.g. Roger Ebert gave Eternal Sunshine a rating of ...", for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Although this approach may be also used on Wikipedia, it can seem unencyclopedically colloquial if used for works that have short titles to begin with. Also avoid this usage if confusion could occur, as when the abbreviated form could refer to another element in the same franchise that is also mentioned in our article (Shannara adapts literary high fantasy ... would not work well at our article on The Shannara Chronicles, because "Shannara" appears in the titles of the books on which the TV series is based). Abbreviated forms should be retained as-is in direct quotations, and may be clarified if necessary with square-bracketed editorial insertions.

It is common to shorten a reference to a work in a series to just its subtitle on second and later mention, or when the context already makes it clear what the overarching title is.

In all cases, such abbreviations follow the italic or quotation-marked style of the full title.