Special Characters

A. We’d vote for the multiplication sign, ×. This character is the norm in horticultural contexts—for example, to indicate the crossing of two plant species, as in Magnolia denudata × M. liliiflora, the hybrid tree commonly known as the saucer magnolia (see CMOS 8.125).

By writing “Louis Vuitton × Yayoi Kusama,” you are suggesting something similar. And though not everyone will pick up on the metaphor (in which art imitates nature), a garden-variety X or x might strike those of us who know a thing or two about typography as a cheap imitation. (For more on ×, see this related Q&A.)

A. Great question! Let’s take another trip into the unknown, this time using the potentially ambiguous symbol × (not to be confused with the letter x).

If the character is in a Word document, it’s easy to find out what it is. First, select the character. Next, open the Symbol dialog box from the Insert tab. This dialog box should give you the info you need (shown here using a PC; on a Mac, the interface and what it shows will be a little different):

The Unicode name is “Multiplication Sign”; the character code is 00D7.

If you don’t have Word, try copying and pasting the character into a search engine. If the character isn’t on your screen, try searching by name. A search for either “×” or “multiplication sign Unicode” (or “times symbol Unicode” or the like) should return useful results. Wikipedia—a good source for this kind of purely technical info—will often appear near the top of the list.

But don’t rely on the first answer you come across. Let’s say that, according to Wikipedia, the Unicode number for the multiplication sign is 00D7. If you search the Unicode code charts for 00D7, you should get a link to the latest version of the chart with that character, which you can use to confirm that it’s the one you want (as we’ll see below).

Or, if you use Google Docs, you could draw the symbol in the dialog box that appears when you go to Insert > Special characters (in the menu). But it’s not a foolproof solution. Draw a multiplication sign and you could be faced with ten or more possibilities; that sign isn’t the only character resembling an X. You’ll need to hover over each result to get more info. The fourth one—multiplication X, U+2715—looks promising:

Or is it? Not quite: U+2715 is a similar glyph, but it’s not equivalent to the multiplication sign, as the arrow next to 2715 in Unicode’s chart for 00D7 will tell us (in this snippet from the fifth page):

You’d be right to infer that U+00D7, classified as a mathematical operator, must be the one to use for math, but U+00D7 isn’t one of the ten X-shaped characters that came up for us in Google Docs, whereas U+2715 is one of the ten (and includes “multiplication” in its name).

But if you do a search for “2715” at the Unicode page linked to above, you’ll discover that this “multiplication x” is in an entirely different chart—where it’s one of nearly two hundred “dingbats,” a collection of special characters that are more ornamental than mathematical.

Assuming you want the character designed for mathematical contexts, the right choice is U+00D7 and not its somewhat larger dingbat cousin—or any of the other imposters (several of which are also dingbats). Most characters will be easier to pin down than that one (and less likely to be dingbats), but it’s always a good idea to check more than one source.

A. None that we know of. The closest we could find from Unicode is the paragraphus mark, Unicode 2E4D, listed as one of the marks of “historic punctuation” in Unicode’s chart for Supplemental Punctuation.

Here’s a snippet from that chart, which says the mark “indicates the beginning of a paragraph, section, stanza, or proposition”:

The paragraphus mark was added to Unicode in 2018, following a proposal submitted in 2016 by the UC Berkeley Script Encoding Initiative that cited the need “for support of medieval European linguistic and literary research and publication.” It hasn’t yet (as of April 2023) been added to more than a few specialized fonts (which you’d need to install before using the mark).

But the idea is to enable researchers to transcribe the mark; on its own it doesn’t mean stanza (or paragraph or section or proposition). Fortunately, there’s an abbreviation you can use instead: st. (see the table of scholarly abbreviations at CMOS 10.42). Or simply spell out stanza.

A. You’re right that initial caps can provide clarity while circumventing ye olde hyphenation conundrum. But whether it’s the Winking Face emoji or Face with Open Mouth Vomiting (to use the Unicode names for those two icons), initial caps, though helpful, are likely to seem like overkill in fiction and many other contexts outside of emoji documentation. And we agree that hyphens could likewise become tiresome: face-with-open-mouth-vomiting emoji? 🤮

Unicode, the international consortium that assigns names and code points to every character on your screen, including emoji, uses all capital letters in its code charts and related documentation for what it calls formal character names to differentiate these from alternative names and descriptions. For example, the chart that includes the Vulcan salute emoji lists the following: “1F596 🖖 RAISED HAND WITH PART BETWEEN MIDDLE AND RING FINGERS = Vulcan salute.” Or, in another chart, there’s the “face palm” emoji: “1F926 🤦 FACE PALM = frustration, disbelief.”

Some observations: (1) Emoji names that aren’t already hyphenated can usually be left unhyphenated even when the name precedes and modifies the word “emoji” (e.g., the Vulcan salute emoji or even the face with open mouth vomiting emoji). (2) When you need to single out an emoji name for any reason, try quotation marks instead of all caps or initial caps (e.g., the “face palm” emoji). (3) When the name as such isn’t the focus, you won’t need quotation marks or caps, but be sure to adjust capitalization and spelling as needed to match the style of the surrounding text.

Relative to the last point, “Vulcan” is a proper noun, so it keeps its capital V. But in Chicago style one would refer to the facepalm emoji, not the face palm emoji—because in Merriam-Webster the noun form of “facepalm” (here used attributively) is one word.

In sum, though it’s fine to refer to, for example, the Winking Face emoji when it’s important to single out the name—and though CMOS doesn’t yet rule on this—we would suggest quotation marks as a useful alternative for most contexts. And when the name isn’t the focus, there’s no need to use either quotation marks or caps—or, in most cases, hyphens.

A. Either way is OK as long as you’re consistent. If you use the ellipsis character, put a space before and after it … like that. At the end of a sentence, it follows a period and a space, like this. … If a comma or other punctuation follows, close it up to the ellipsis …, like that. A publisher (or copyeditor) following Chicago style can search for this special character (Unicode 2026) and replace it with Chicago’s spaced periods . . . like that or, at the end of a sentence, like this. . . . Where a comma, semicolon, colon, question mark, or exclamation point follows the ellipsis, it is preceded by a space, like this . . . ; an exception is made for marks that come in pairs, including a quotation mark, “like this . . .”—and a dash . . .—like that (and a parenthesis [or bracket], like this . . .). To keep each ellipsis (and any mark of punctuation that follows) on the same line, nonbreaking spaces will need to be applied for publication (as we’ve done here). An ellipsis can begin a new line, so there is no need to precede an ellipsis by a nonbreaking space.

A. An emoji that applies to a sentence as a whole might logically follow the period or other terminal punctuation. Let’s coin a term and call this a sentence emoji. 😉 Then, by a similar logic, emoji applying to a word or a phrase could immediately follow that word or phrase, before any mark of punctuation 🔍, like that. Emoji standing in for words, like this picture of a 🐈—well, you get the idea. But like if you’re texting? Most of this logic goes out the window (along with the punctuation). Love your emoji btw!

A. Chicago style is “49th parallel” (or “forty-ninth parallel,” as advocated in CMOS 8.47, if you are spelling out numbers one through one hundred). If you use Microsoft Word, you will get “49^th parallel” by default. To change this behavior, go to Options > Proofing > AutoCorrect to turn off the superscript setting for ordinals in AutoFormat and AutoFormat As You Type. Or you can type Ctrl+Z (Command-Z on a Mac) to undo the “correction” each time you type an ordinal.

A. You’re not nitpicking—the use of $ with dollars or bucks signals ignorance or incompetence to many readers. But your bigwigs would surely count The Chicago Manual of Style as a meganitpicker, so our advice isn’t likely to help. Someday you’ll have the power! Till then, feel good that you did your job.

A. That’s right: there is no space after a relation sign when it acts as a modifier (e.g., for all quantities <10 km), but there is space on both sides when it acts as a verb (e.g., for all quantities such that p < .001).

A. This is exactly what style manuals were invented for: so that editors can impose consistency as they read without stopping to ponder each issue as it arises. Style manuals also tend to be based on long-term observation of style trends, so that consulting a manual can save an editor from an embarrassing departure from convention. Rather than let whichever author comes first in the book dictate the style (do I hear a collective gasp?), check a manual like CMOS and find that footnote superscripts are normally set in roman type and mathematical variables are set in italics.