Italics and Quotation Marks

A. CMOS doesn’t discuss this problem specifically, but thanks to your question we now have a name for it: “calling something something else.” If we had to formulate a rule, we might say that italics or quotation marks are usually unnecessary for words introduced with a form of the verb to call but may be used to highlight the word or phrase as a key term. In CMOS, you’ll mostly see an absence of italics or quotation marks after call: “The front of the leaf, the side that lies to the right in an open book, is called the recto” (CMOS 1.5). Or “The author’s own statement about a work is usually called a preface” (CMOS 1.41).

But starting with the seventeenth edition, we made an exception in chapter 5, where we agreed to italicize the names of grammatical concepts (many of which are unfamiliar even to editors):

Pronouns with antecedents are called anaphoric pronouns. (Anaphora refers to the use of a word or phrase to refer to or replace one used earlier.) (CMOS 5.28)

Sets of word forms by which a language differentiates the functions that a word performs in a sentence are called the word’s cases. (CMOS 5.35)

But here’s an interesting case of a different kind:

We is sometimes used by an individual who is speaking for a group . . . This latter use is called “the editorial we.” (CMOS 5.47)

Outside of chapter 5 we would have written that it’s called the editorial we (as we did in chapter 5 in CMOS 16)—italics for we as a word, but otherwise no special treatment for the phrase as a whole. For the sake of consistency, however, we put the phrase in quotation marks. (Alternatively, we could have written that it’s called the editorial “we”—reversing the roles of italics and quotation marks.)

In sum, consider whether you are focusing on the word or phrase as a word or phrase, or simply offering a description. Then be consistent about it—and watch out for tricky cases.

A. In either case, italics are unnecessary. Write “the number twelve” (or “the number 12”; see CMOS 9.3 for Chicago’s alternative rule for spelling out numbers) and, for example, “the name Ruth.”

Italics (or quotation marks) for words or letters used as such are designed to prevent misreading the word or letter as literally part of the grammatical sentence; no such ambiguity is likely with numbers or names. So, for example, the following sentence could be ambiguous without italics or quotation marks:

The word search was starting to bother me.

On the other hand, special treatment may be necessary for names or numbers in certain cases:

Type “Ruth” into the search box, then hit Enter.

A. Good question! The purpose of using italics for non-English words in an English-language context is (a) to prevent them from being misunderstood as an unfamiliar English word (or as a typographical error) and (b) to signal a switch from English spelling style to another convention.

But italics aren’t automatically necessary for non-English words in an English context. In the context of your examples it’s obvious that the terms are names of food. The choice can also depend on the frequency of such words (isolated terms are more likely to merit italics) and on the perspective of the narrator or speaker. For example, a non-English term used in dialogue would rarely merit italics, since it can be assumed that it is part of the vocabulary of the person speaking it.