Headlines and Titles of Works

A. Except as the first or last word in a title, prepositions (and a few other categories) remain lowercase in titles in Chicago style—and in most other styles—because they’re not considered important enough to capitalize.

The first edition of the Manual (published in 1906) said to capitalize “all the principal words (i.e., nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, first and last words) in English titles of publications” (see ¶ 37). In the examples of titles that followed this advice, only the, and, of, and on—one article, one conjunction, and two prepositions, all of them short—were lowercase.

This advice remained mostly unchanged until the twelfth edition (1969), the first one to name the lowercase exceptions—and to clarify that length isn’t a factor: “Lowercase articles, coordinate conjunctions, and prepositions, regardless of length” (7.123; emphasis added).

A new paragraph demonstrated the rule and included a title with a very long preposition: “Digression concerning Madness” (12th ed., 7.128; emphasis added). Many other styles, including AP, APA, and AMA, would capitalize “concerning” in a title simply because it’s long (four letters is a common limit for prepositions).

At least one style guide, New Hart’s Rules (2nd ed., Oxford, 2014), takes a less strict approach—for example, recommending lowercase for possessive pronouns and allowing for exceptions based on appearance: An Actor and his Time and All About Eve (“a short title may look best with capitals on words that might be left lower case in a longer title” [8.2.3]).

So the rules have always been a little bit arbitrary. But Chicago and most other styles include guidelines that are designed to help writers and editors make quick decisions rather than considering the words in a title on a case-by-case basis. For more on this subject, see “Is ‘Is’ Always Capitalized in Titles?” at CMOS Shop Talk.

A. The phrase “out of” is listed as a preposition in Merriam-Webster (among other dictionaries), so it would normally remain lowercase in the middle of a title or heading following Chicago style.

But even as part of the phrase “out of,” the word out tends to read like an adverb (or sometimes an adjective, depending on whether it follows a noun or verb form), which may be why publishers seem to want to capitalize it in the phrase “out of” more often than not—as in the titles Bat Out of Hell (the album by Meat Loaf, featuring a song of the same title) and Getting Out of Saigon (a book by Ralph White [Simon & Schuster, 2023]).

Nonetheless, Chicago style would be Bat out of Hell and Getting out of Saigon. This would work well for Meat Loaf’s sixth studio album: Bat out of Hell II: Back into Hell. If nothing else, “out of” is then consistent with “into.”

[Editor’s update: As several of our readers have been kind enough to point out to us, it would make more sense in the Saigon title to treat “getting out” as a phrasal verb than to treat “out of” as a phrasal preposition. The result—​​Getting Out of Saigon—capitalizes the word “out” as an adverb (per CMOS 8.159, rule 3), putting the emphasis where it belongs, on Getting Out.]

A. Use roman and initial caps in both contexts—for example, when you mention or cite the article “My Spectacular Betrayal” in the Modern Love column in the New York Times.¹ The lack of quotation marks helps keep the name of the column distinct from the article title. See also CMOS 8.177.

__________

1. Samantha Silva, “My Spectacular Betrayal,” Modern Love, New York Times, May 19, 2023.

A. The word that is always capitalized in a title. That’s because that’s never a preposition, and though it can function as a conjunction—for example, when it introduces a subordinate clause (e.g., “Tell Me That You Mean It”)—it isn’t one of the seven common coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, nor, for, so, yet). In your example, “That” is a relative pronoun.

For more details and examples, see CMOS 8.159 and 8.160.

A. The lack of italics for the Bible and its books probably has less to do with divine inspiration than with the fact that the word “bible” comes from Greek biblia, meaning “books.” “The Bible,” then, is the proper name for a special set of books rather than the formal title of a publication.

The same might be said of the Koran, or Qur’an, a title that in Arabic means “recitation.” Other sacred works have similarly generic or descriptive titles.

As for Genesis, Exodus, and so on, had the Bible been published as a book for the first time today, it would have been called The Bible (in italics), and each major “book” therein would have been treated as a titled chapter or section and put in quotation marks: “Genesis,” “Exodus,” etc.

Ultimately, it’s up to the author how to style such names. But you might ask your author to consider the idea that the stylistic conventions for referring to the Bible and its books predate modern publishing (and its style guides).

A. Yes. Unless you’re referring specifically to the title of that list (as it’s styled on the Times website), you can use the name of the publication (New York Times) attributively and treat “bestseller” as an ordinary noun (as you’ve done).

(Note that the entry at Merriam-Webster.com for “bestseller” was updated in 2022 to list the one-word form ahead of two-word “best seller,” an equal variant. References on this site to “best seller” predate that change.)

A. Treat the contracting apostrophe in “o’clock” as if it were a hyphen and write Four O’Clock—capital O and C. The O is capitalized as the first word in a compound term, and the C because clock is a noun. If it helps, think of the title as short for “Four Of-the-Clock” (rather than “Four of the Clock”—​though the latter is how the term would normally be spelled out).

See also CMOS 8.161, which explains Chicago’s rules for capitalizing hyphenated compounds in titles.

A. The point of rule 3 is this: If the unhyphenated form might conceivably be spelled as one word, then use lowercase for subsequent elements:

Are Antihistamines Overprescribed? (lowercase h in “histamines”)

Are Anti-intellectuals Overrated? (lowercase i in “intellectuals”)

But “NonEnglishspeaking” would never be correct, so “Speaking” needs to be capitalized. For hyphens with prefixes, see CMOS 7.89, section 4.

A. It’s not uncommon for the title of a book, article, or other work to use a capitalization style that’s different from the one recommended by Chicago. In (almost) all cases, Chicago style (or whatever style you follow) would take precedence when such a title is mentioned in the text. Most advise applying some variation of headline style (a.k.a. title case).

For example, both the cover and title page for Finding Me, the memoir by Viola Davis (HarperOne, 2022), feature all caps: FINDING ME. Chicago style, as we’ve just seen, would apply title case (and italics).

Or there’s The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor—the Truth and the Turmoil, by Tina Brown (Crown, 2022). On that book’s cover and title page, the main title is in all caps, and the subtitle is in title case. There’s no colon between title and subtitle. Chicago style imposes title case for the main title and adds a colon (see CMOS 8.165).

Not that we’d never make an exception. For example, Chicago style would normally call for Star Trek: Into Darkness as the title of that 2013 film. Both the movie posters and the title screen itself feature all-caps “STAR TREK” on its own line; “INTO DARKNESS” is on the line below that, in a type size that differentiates it from the line above. CMOS would therefore treat “Star Trek” as the main title and “Into Darkness” as the subtitle—adding a colon between the two.

But we know that—after much debate—the world seems to have settled on Star Trek Into Darkness (capital I, no colon). The preposition “into” wouldn’t normally merit a capital I without the colon, and the absence of a colon does seem a little odd, but we’d allow both exceptions in the spirit of maintaining intergalactic harmony.

A. Whoever decided that “to” should be considered part of the infinitive verb form in English has caused more trouble than such a small word is worth (see “infinitives, split”). It certainly doesn’t merit capitalization in titles. The first eleven editions of CMOS said to capitalize all “important” words in a title: “nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, first words, and last words.” Starting with the twelfth edition, that advice was expanded to clarify that “verbs” did not extend to the “to” in infinitives, which should remain lowercase in titles (see CMOS 8.169 in the current, or seventeenth, edition). So,

Born to Run (where “to” marks the infinitive)

“Midnight Train to Georgia” (where “to” is a preposition)

But, when “to” is the first or last word,

To Kill a Mockingbird (infinitive marker)

To the Lighthouse (preposition)

“If You Asked Me To” (infinitive marker [verb implied])

Exceptions in the middle of a title would be rare. Here’s one, in the title of an article from volume 2012 of the journal Supreme Court Review:

“ ‘To Regulate,’ Not ‘To Prohibit’: Limiting the Commerce Power”

CMOS doesn’t cover that scenario. (If we did, we might say to capitalize the first and last words in a quoted phrase within a title.) Rarer still would be a title that featured “to” as an adverb—as in the phrase “come to” in the sense of “regain consciousness.” You’ll have to take our word for it that we’d capitalize the T in that case.