Registered Trademarks

Q. CMOS 8.154 covers lowercase and CamelCase trade names, but it doesn’t specify how to deal with wordmarks that are partly in italics. I would prefer to set them the same way as any other word, but I would also love an official ruling on this!

A. Italics, like other such typographic treatments in trademarked names (including boldface and color), can usually be ignored. For example, EBSCOhost becomes EBSCOhost; whereas the capital letters are meaningful (“EBSCO” is an acronym based on the founder’s name plus the abbreviation for “Company”), the italics as such are not. You could refer to these as vanity italics, which, like vanity lowercase (e.g., adidas or intel), are intended to support the latest branding efforts by a corporation in service of its product but are less helpful to those of us who write about such things.