Wikipedia:Proper names and proper nouns

Editors sometimes draw on philosophical themes concerning proper names, in writing, editing, and discussing on Wikipedia – with confusing and sometimes strife-inducing results (most often at WP:Requested moves). Such themes are far less relevant for writing and editing the encyclopedia; only the linguistics take on proper names is truly useful and relevant in determining matters of written formal-English orthography, especially matters of capitalization. Predominant usage in reputable nonfiction publishers is of paramount importance, as repeatedly made clear in our own Wikipedia:Manual of Style.

Divergent themes concerning proper names, in linguistics and philosophy

• A proper name in linguistics – and in the specific sense employed at Wikipedia – is normally a kind of noun phrase. That is, it has a noun or perhaps another noun phrase as its core component (or head), and perhaps one or more modifiers. Most proper names have a proper noun as their head: Old Trafford; Bloody Mary. Very many have only a proper noun as their head, and no modifiers: Dublin; Mary. Some have a common noun as their head (such as university), along with modifiers: the University of the Third Age; the Open University. Some, like Westward Ho in its various senses, contain no noun at all but function in sentences as if they were noun phrases. A proper name serves to identify and refer to a particular thing (or sometimes things), which may be unique, or a particular group, or a special class of things; but usually not a generalized class of things: London, The Sound and the Fury, Indira Gandhi, Batman, the Rocky Mountains, the Balkans. Few proper names have only one possible referent: London is a proper name whether it refers to "the" London in England or to London, Ontario (or is used as either a British or Jewish surname rendered as London), and whether or not the context makes it clear to the reader which was meant.
  • In English and most other languages with upper- and lower-case letterforms, the main elements in proper names are usually capitalized, though there is not quite a one-to-one relationship between fixed use of capital letters (as opposed to incidental capitalization, such as at the start of a sentence) and a text string being a proper name. Some names are without capitals because of the owner's preference: k.d. lang; and capitalization occurs in common nouns also, when derived from a proper name: Balkanization; Spaniard; Turk.
  • In English and many other languages, proper names can occur not only in their primary role but also as modifiers (underlined here): London broil; Zermelo set theory; New Zealand footballers; Trinidad and Tobago President Christine Kangaloo. Like common nouns that are derived or associated with proper names (a few are mentioned above), adjectives, verbs, and adverbs derived from proper names are not themselves proper names, but they are normally still capitalized in English (though not in many other languages): Dickensian and Balkan (adjectives), Balkanize (verb), Trumpishly (adverb).
  • From the above it will be clear that many noun phrases containing a proper name (or containing a bare proper noun, in some analyses of certain cases) are not themselves proper names: Tourette['s] syndrome, APA style (on Wikipedia we do not render them over-capitalized Tourette Syndrome or APA Style, though some other writers and publishers do). In these cases there is ordinary non-proper-name reference to a medical syndrome (often called simply Tourette or Tourette's) and a citation style (in context often just called APA, which is an abbreviation of the proper name American Psychological Association). It is only sometimes necessary to include disambiguating extra wording, when the sense of Tourette's, for example, is not made clear by the context.
  • Whether an expression qualifies as a proper name in the linguistic sense is often considered subjective, dependent not just on the language but on the particular register of the speech or writing in which it occurs, and (some would say) even on arbitrary house style decisions. Wikipedia has style guidelines (start at WP:Manual of Style/Capital letters) for determining matters of capitalization in writing the encyclopedia, and these guidelines appeal to the notions of proper name and proper noun in a way informed by sound linguistic theory.
• A proper name in philosophy is an expression (whether spoken, written, or otherwise encoded) whose specialized role is to denote some unique imaginary or real entity (a thing, a person, a place, an abstraction, or whatever). In this it does not differ materially from the concept of proper name as discussed in linguistic theory; but compared to the linguistic basics laid out above, issues raised in philosophy are far less relevant to Wikipedia writing and editing, or the development of article-naming policy and style guidelines for this vast encyclopedia.
  • For some philosophers of language no single proper name can lay claim to the form London or the form Virginia. Out of context, Virginia cannot pick out exactly one referent (it could refer to any one of the many persons bearing that name, or the US state, and so on). For these philosophers, the expression Virginia is a multiply ambiguous generic name. In any particular use or context of use, however, Virginia truly can pick out just one from a number of candidate referents; so how it differs from ordinary expressions – like this girl, that state, or a certain battleship – is problematic. Virginia, along with innumerable other expressions, might usefully be considered a set of homonyms, and each homonym (to which we could in theory assign a "serial number") is then a genuine proper name: Virginia.1 might uniquely refer to the US state; Virginia.2 to Virginia Woolf; Virginia.3 to USS Virginia (BB-13) the pre-dreadnought battleship; ...; Virginia.306419 to Mrs Virginia Templeton late of Coober Pedy, and so on.

    For other philosophers, the expression Virginia is indeed a genuine proper name in its own right, even when unattached to any context of use. For them, the fact that many proper names are intrinsically generic presents no problem. It is the versatile proper name Virginia that successfully refers, in various contexts of use, to a US state, a famous author, a battleship, an opal miner, and so on. Still others who consider the matter as philosophers draw different conclusions.

    This significant philosophical issue does not figure prominently in linguistic discussions of proper names, and it is irrelevant in determining the status of expressions (to settle questions of capitalization, for example) on Wikipedia.

  • Innumerable items may perhaps be treated as proper names in philosophy of language but not in linguistics. Any sentence in which a term or phrase aims to identify something specific might arguably include a proper name (sometimes an ad hoc proper name) in the sense intended by some philosophers. But the vast majority of such constructions are not proper names as typically discussed in linguistic theory, which is more concerned with matters of convention that bypass abstract considerations of context.
  • Dominant philosophical senses of the term proper name do not tie it to any particular language or any particular set of style choices. They therefore contribute little value to discussions of capitalization, or of anything else orthographic.
  • In sum, Wikipedia editing can benefit only slightly from philosophical conceptions of proper naming. They may help editors understand that writing (most often by a specialist presuming knowledge on the part of the reader) can fail to make it certain what some particular term refers to; but this is at heart a matter of clarity and accuracy, not of naming in any practical sense. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia-writing project, not an ivory tower for the generation of theory for theory's sake.

Mixing the two approaches does not work

It's unfortunate that theory about proper names is pursued in two separate though overlapping literatures, each with its particular emphases and concerns. They use divergent lines of analysis: those developed in linguistics are highly relevant on Wikipedia, while those prominent in philosophy are rarely useful for anyone editing or applying style guidelines and title policy.

The linguistics take on proper names has implications for how to style a name, according to the languages, registers, and styles used at any particular article. Great difficulties arise in wrangling with definitional approaches that are only apt in the philosophy take on proper names. Such distractions are a major reason for Wikipedia's style guide adopting a simple default rule, the first one at WP:Manual of Style/Capital letters (or WP:MOSCAPS): Do not capitalize an expression unless the overwhelming majority of independent reliable sources do so for that specific expression, in the context of the relevant article.

It is not possible for this rule, or any style rule, to keep everyone happy on every occasion. That's the nature of rules. We just have to live with it and move on, because the purpose of our rules is not propounding deep truths or righting great wrongs, but providing a consistent presentation for readers, and (secondarily) causing a reduction of recurrent "bikeshedding" strife between editors over the styling details in Wikipedia text.

The philosophy approach leads to confusion in encyclopedia work

Because philosophy-based treatments of proper name have nothing to do with style, and aren't really applicable to anything we do in writing an encyclopedia, drawing on them brings confusion. Examples:

• "Why do we capitalize Oxford University, Yale Law School, Max Planck Society, Open Source Applications Foundation, and United States Postal Service, but then write cultural anthropology, law professorship, Planck's constant, open-source software, postal carrier and postmaster? Don't the latter examples each positively identify a specific subject?"
• "How can it be that we write King of France Louis XIV, but Louis XIV, the French king? Aren't they both exactly equivalent specific identifiers?"
• "It's unconvincing to me that the name of a trademarked or official thing like Microsoft or Scottish Parliament gets capitals, but an iconic principle like law of gravity does not. Surely the latter is more important and deserves capitalization even more."
• "Why should we not use capitalization to provide recognition and disambiguation for things not always readily parsed as names, such as Snakes and Ladders?"
• "My field guides for rocks and minerals, for birds, and for reptiles and amphibians capitalize (and boldface) all entries. So why doesn't Wikipedia write Picrite Basalt, Plain-Backed Sparrow, and Barred Tiger Salamander? How are these not proper names (or derived from or associated with proper names) like the Hope Diamond, Koko (the gorilla), Neanderthals, and Vikings? Aren't these all specific terms for particular substances, organisms, or populations?"
• "While US presidential election is not a proper name, surely the 2024 US Presidental Election must be, since it's specific. Or maybe US Presidential Election itself is one after all, since it's more specific than a presidential election or presidential elections."

The short answer: Because it is not conventional to capitalize these elements across most academic writing (of which encyclopedic writing is a subset). That is, current English does not treat the relevant expressions as proper names (or as associated with proper names) in the ways covered by modern linguistic theory. Consequently, they are not generally capitalized in our source material, especially secondary sources written for a general audience.

It may be conventional to capitalize some of them in specific kinds of writing. Ornithology and herpetology journals frequently do capitalize the vernacular names of species, for example, primarily as a form of disambiguation because so many birds, reptiles, and amphibians have names that are easily confused with visual descriptions. But it is not broadly accepted to capitalize them outside of specialized writing – and an encyclopedia is the complete opposite of specialized writing. Any given expression, from "former manager" to "oral traditions" to "elderly population" to "high voltage", might be found capitalized in some other material somewhere, but it is most often marketing, advocacy, warning/advisory material, legalese, officialese, headlinese, field guide and tabular database entries, or otherwise unrelated to encyclopedic writing. If the independent, reliable sources are mostly not doing it, then Wikipedia won't do it either.

Each of those example questions has a more specific answer; most of the answers can be discovered easily at WP:MOS and its subsidiary pages: our Wikipedia style guide.

The philosophy approach leans against Wikipedia policy and guidelines

Dwelling on philosophical shades of meaning and uncertainty concerning the notion of proper name (knowingly, or merely from a linguistically uninformed stance) will soon clash with Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines. Conflicts with the style guidelines will arise, along with failures to abide by core content policies. For example, a "philosophical" obsession with questions of meaning and uniqueness inspires some editors to misuse capitalization to signify, as an unencyclopedic form of emphasis. This is often an unnecessary attempt at disambiguation, in an unhelpfully compressed "expert to expert" style of presentation. Better just to write more clearly from the start, for a broad audience. Wikipedia science and humanities articles are not written like submissions to academic journals, any more than our articles on pop musicians are written in the style of Spin or Rolling Stone magazines, or those on Catholicism or Shinto read as if written by priests.

Over-capitalization inspired by a felt need to signify is also done for signaling of subjective importance or status of the subject in the mind of the editor: an obvious failure to maintain the WP:Neutral point of view. Similarly, importing or inventing a capitalization scheme that only makes sense in the light of personal conviction is a form of WP:Original research: almost a kind of language-change advocacy. If an overwhelming majority of reliable sources, across all of English writing (not just within a particular subfield's specialist publications), do not conventionally capitalize the relevant expressions, then there is in fact no such convention. Insisting otherwise is personal preference, not a real-world fact that passes Wikipedia's stringent WP:Verifiability standards.

The two approaches to proper names differ in kind, as well as in their effects

Scope and convention

Philosophical analysis of proper names is irrelevant to how we on Wikipedia settle detailed styling in articles, versus what other publishers may choose to do.

Meanwhile, the linguistic approach presents different evidence and guides to action depending on the language. In English especially, proper names are intimately bound up with orthography. Adjectives like Italian are derived from proper names, and in English this is usually sufficient to make them capitalised; but they may not be capitalised in Spanish, French, or many other "alphabetic" languages (the detailed differences are complex, as discussed at Proper name). Some alphabetic and all non-alphabetic scripts lack capitalization entirely; so our familiar linguistic understandings of proper names would need rethinking from scratch, in dealing with those languages. Even in English we use capitalization for many purposes, such as situationally or contextually at the start of a sentence or in main words in headings or the titles or works, etc. And most acronyms and initialisms are capitalized throughout.

These are matters of convention, not philosophical principle. And as conventions they are looser than many would like. Various proper names do not receive capitals, e.g. k.d. lang, danah boyd (because of the owners' preferences). Others receive them where most expressions do not, as in The Hague (with a capital T on historical grounds alone); and iPhone is given a capital in mid-word only (not out of deference to the intellectual-property concerns of the trademark holder, which generally do not carry much weight at Wikipedia, but because the real world has near-univerally gone along with that particular trademark stylization). None of these examples suits a particular philosophical categorization, nor even some genuine linguistic principle. They are determined solely by convention, as reflected in reliable sources independent of those subjects.

Disagreements within, not just between, linguistics and philosophy

These language-usage vagaries are just not connected in any Wikipedia-relevant way to the philosophy use of the phrase proper name. To the extent any linguists and philosophers are trying (largely in vain) to merge the two concepts, various papers and rather expensive books are still being published on such ideas. Philosophers disagree with each other (over quite a variety of quibbles) about what qualifies as a proper name, and the same is true (though perhaps less so) in linguistics. E.g., not all linguists are convinced that South Africa is truly a proper name, while all of them agree that Africa by itself is one. Some also do not accept plurals or terms with "the" as proper names; for them, Turk is a proper name but the Turks is not, though it is to many others, including mainstream publishers). Yet another variable element is whether: a) the name is purely descriptive, which may not qualify as a proper name to anyone (my neighbor's largest dog, or 27th ascent of Mount Everest); or b) it originated as literal description but is no longer interpreted that way, and may thus have mutated into a proper name according to some, especially if convention capitalizes it: Northern Hemisphere); versus c) it is completely non-descriptive, in English anyway (Indira Gandhi, Kodak – definitely proper names); or d) it is only descriptive in a metaphorical or evocative sense (Rocky Mountains, Pacific Ocean, Great War) – cases which more easily qualify for the label proper name (quibbles about a leading the aside) to more linguists and philosophers alike than do mostly-just-descriptive names such as Northern Hemisphere, South African Navy, and World War I.

Such debates have gone on for over 200 years, and will not be settled any time soon. Definitional struggles and publications related to them have had no palpable impact on such questions in the world at large, and thus none on how Wikipedia approaches proper names – as conventionalized proper-noun phrases (and their modifier derivatives in most cases), following the dominant usage in English-language nonfiction from reputable publishers. Wikipedia will not play a part in attempting to settle these questions; that is not the encyclopedia's role, nor part of the Wikimedia Foundation's mission.

Transmission and reception of meaning

Yet another way of looking at this is transmission versus reception of meaning. The key to the meaning of proper name in linguistics is authorial intent, or editorial knowledge. It does not matter for this definition whether readers in the aggregate, or a particular reader, get the intended meaning. What matters is that the writer is broadcasting a meaning that points to a specific (though not necessarily singular) referent, using a name conventionally treated as proper. The key to the meaning of proper name in philosophy is whether a competent reader (or competent readers in the aggregate) can get the intended specific-referent meaning. The philosophic properness of the name effectively only exists on the receiving end. Or it can be thought of as a probability, derived from the percentage of accurate audience inference of the specific subject from an attempt at proper naming. The writer/speaker will probably have an intuitive sense of how high the probability is for a particular audience and context.

Titles

While both the linguistic and philosophical approaches to proper naming could be thought of as at least slightly informing the first three criteria of our WP:Article titles policy – recognizability, naturalness, and precision – it is not helpful to try to talk about these in terms of the philosophy of names, and they are not grounded in philosophy; the relationship is coincidental at best. These title criteria are not theoretical at all, but pure-practicality matters of clarity in writing and in information architecture.

Philosophy arguments about proper names are confusing to the vast majority of editors, who are steeped necessarily in the more applicable linguistic sense of proper name (and the most everyday version of that sense).

See also

• Wikipedia:Common-style fallacy
• Wikipedia:Specialized-style fallacy