class="bi x0 y0 w0 h2"
class="bi x0 y0 w0 h4"
class="bi x0 y0 w0 h5"
THE
OXFORD GUIDE TO
STYLE

The
Oxford
Guide
to Style
R.
M.
RITTER
OXPORD
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
OXPORD
UNIVERSITY
PRESS
Great
Clarendon Street, Oxford
0x2
6DP
Oxford
University
Press
is
a
department

Salaam
Delhi
Hong
Kong
Istanbul Karachi Kolkata
Kuala
Lumpur Madrid Melbourne
Mexico
City Mumbai Nairobi
Säo
Paulo
Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto
Oxford
is
a
registered
trade mark
of
Oxford
University
Press
in
the
UK
and in certain
other
countries
©
Oxford
University

system,
or transmitted, in
any
form or
by
any
means,
without
the prior
permission
in
writing
of
Oxford
University
Press,
or
as
expressly
permitted
by
law,
or under terms
agreed
with
the appropriate
reprographics
rights
organization.
Enquiries

impose
this
same
condition on
any
acquirer
British
Library
Cataloguing
in
Publication
Data
Data
available
Library
of
Congress
Cataloging
in
Publication Data
Data
available
ISBN
0-19-869175-0
10
98765432
Designed
by
Jane
Stevenson

Compositors
and
Readers
at
the
University
Press,
Oxford.
Over
the course of thirty-nine editions,
Hart's
Rules
has grown to be the stan-
dard work in its
field,
explaining subject
by
subject each major aspect
of
punctuation,
capitalization,
italics,
hyphenation, abbreviations, foreign
languages,
and
other
publishing matters
big
and
small.

staff
of
the Clarendon
Press,
the learned
imprint
of
Oxford University
Press.
The
title
page plainly stated
that
the booklet
contained
'Rules
for Compositors and
Readers,
which are to be observed
in
all
cases
where no special instructions are
given'.
Since
the
Press
printed
a good deal of work for
other

sold
for
profit'. Over time,
as
the
size
and
authority
of
the
Rules
grew—aided
by
its
publication and worldwide
dissemination—
the book
assumed
a
life
of
its own
far
beyond the confines
of
Oxford.
Suc-
ceeding
generations have found it indispensable to anyone concerned
with

Press:
An
Informal
History,
describes
them
as
'two
of
the most influential books ever published
by
the
Press'.
Readers
familiar
with
Hart's
Rules
will find changes from previous
editions. It
is
quite
natural
that
this should be
so:
if
recreating two such
vi
Preface

Hart
would recognize immediately. For no
matter
what
changes
occur in the expectations and
responsibilities
of
those who
originate,
manipulate, and disseminate words, and in the means by
which they go about it, the
goal
remains to accomplish each task
efficiently
and accurately. In
part
for this reason I use
editor
wherever
possible
in this
guide
to denote
anyone
involved
with
adjusting
text.
This

Italic type
is
generally
used to indicate specific
examples
of
usage.
Exceptions occur when some ambiguity might other-
wise
arise,
as
in
passages
discussing
the
use
of
italic
versus
roman
type.
In
such cases examples are printed within quotation marks, in italic or
roman type
as
necessary.
It would be too much to hope
that
a wide-ranging book devoted
specifically

been for previous editions.
Acknowledgements
From the first,
Hart's
Rules
always relied on the knowledge of
experts
in
the field, and this new edition is no exception. Much
of
this edition was
compiled in conjunction
with
the second edition
of
the
Oxford
Dictionary
for
Writers
and
Editors,
which presents a welcome
opportunity
for me to
thank once
again
those who
generously
gave

gratitude
is
to the generations
of
compositors,
editors, academics, proofreaders, authors, and readers whose labour
established and moulded the material included in this book, and whose
influence endures on every
page.
I
should like
also
to thank the many people associated
with
the
Press
and University who have generously shared their enormous talents in
many
areas,
in particular Bonnie Blackburn, Kate Elliott, Edwin and
Jackie
Pritchard, Chris Rycroft,
J.
S.
G.
Simmons,
Delia
Thompson, George
Tulloch, Colin Wakefield, Hilary Walford, John Was, Connie
Webber,

Editors,
in being
able
to
draw
upon
the extraordinary
range
and
depth
of
knowledge
of
my former
colleagues
at the
Press,
many
of
whom
have
taken considerable
time
and
trouble
to help me over the
years:
the task
would have been unthinkable
without

of
knowledge
for
this book in particular and
OUP
in
general:
in doing
so
he continues
to fulfil the role
of a
Laudian
'Architypographus'.
The
year-long
sabbatical
that
enabled me to complete this book at home
was,
after a decade
of
pursuing it
part-time,
a rare luxury. And
so
I
must
finally
thank my wife, Elizabeth, and my children, Olivia,

8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
The
parts of a book
Preparation of copy and proofs
Abbreviations and symbols
Capitalization and
treatment
of names
Punctuation
Italic,
roman, and other
type
treatments
Numbers
Quotations
Lists
and tables
Illustrations
Languages
Science
and mathematics
Specialist

sion
of
the many excellent
specialist
works
available
for particular fields;
similarly,
foreign-language
dictionaries have not been included. Recom-
mended
English-language
dictionaries are the
New
Oxford
Dictionary
of
English
(Oxford: OUP, 1998) and the
Concise
Oxford
Dictionary,
10th edn.
(Oxford:
OUP,
1999);
for
US
English,
Merriam-Webster's

Press,
1993).
Peter
T.
Daniels and
William
Bright
(eds.),
The World's
Writing
Systems
(New York: OUR
1996).
Margaret Drabble
(ed.),
The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6th edn. (Oxford:
OUR
2000).
H.
W. Fowler and
F.
G. Fowler, The King's English (Oxford: OUR
1973).
Joseph
Gibaldi and Walter
S.
Achtert, MLA Handbook for Writers of
Research
Papers,
5th edn. (New York: Modern Language

and
William
G.
Connolly, The New York
Times
Manual of Style and
Usage,
revised
edn. (New York, NY:
Times
Books,
1999).
Marjorie
E.
Skillen, Robert M.
Gay,
et
al.,
Words
into
Type,
3rd edn. (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ:
Prentice-Hall,
1974).
William
Strunk
Jr.
and E.
B.

as
follows:
BS
ISO
999:1996
Information
and Documentation: Guidelines for the Content,
Organization
and Presentation of Indexes
BS
1629:1989
Recommendation for
References
to
Published
Materials
BS
1749:1985
Recommendations
for Alphabetical
Arrangement
and
the Filing Order of
Numbers
and
Symbols
BS
2979:1958
Transliteration of Cyrillic
and

1000-1981
Specification for
SI
Units
and
Recommendations for the
Use
of
their
Multiples
and
of Certain Other Units
BS
5605:1990
Recommendations
for
Citing
and Referencing Published
Material
BS
5775-0:1993
(ISO
31-0:1992)
Specification for Quantities, Units and
Symbols:
General
Principles
BS
6371:1983
Recommendations

SAMUEL
JOHNSON
Comme
quelqu'un
pourrait
dire
de
moi
que
j'ai
seulement
fait
ici
un
amas
de
fleurs
étrangères,
n'y
ayant
fourni
du
mien
que
le
filet
à
les
lier.
MONTAIGNE

with
other publications and
documents, though it is rare for any work to include all of
them.
Electronic
publications especially will have few of these in the trad-
itional
sense,
and their
arrangement—joined
by
hyperlinks—may
appear
very
different.
Most
publications
are
based
on
page
extents
that
are
a
multiple
of
thirty-
two (sometimes sixteen)
pages,

do
no
harm),
but a
257-page
book
is
problematic. While
fitting
a
publication to an even working
is
not normally an author's, or
even editor's, concern,
both
should be aware of the concept, in
case
an
odd
fit
during setting
necessitates
adjusting the arrangement
of
items in
the book.
1.2
Preliminary
matter
Preliminary

text—as
in the
case
where a book
is
divided into parts,
for
example.
Publishers
try to keep prelims to
a
minimum: paperbacks and children's
books generally have fewer preliminary pages than hardbacks
and
monographs; journals and other periodicals have fewer still. No rigid
rules govern the arrangement of preliminary
matter,
although publish-
ers
routinely develop a house style for its sequence based on the sorts of
publication they produce and
the
combination of preliminary
matter
common to
them.
Books
in a series should have a consistent order, and
those on a
single

new
page,
and two
or
more sections (espe-
cially
lists)
may be combined
to run
together on
a
single
page
if
space
demands and
logic
allows. The decision is based on
what
preliminary
matter
is to be
included
in a
given work,
how
long each section
is
(often—but
not

for
example, often requires a blank verso to avoid the image of the verso's
type
showing
through on
a
nearly
empty preceding
page.
(Bleed-through
is
for the most
part
unnoticeable on
pages
with
similar
amounts
of
text.)
Where
space permits
it
is safest to
put
any dedication or epigraph on
a
new recto
with
a

title
page
title
page verso
dedication
foreword
preface
acknowledgements
contents
(new recto)
(new verso)
(new recto)
(verso)
(new page)
(new recto)
(new recto)
(new page)
(new recto)
table
of
cases
(new page)
table
of
statutes (new page)
list
of
illustrations, figures,
plates,
maps,

are the (usually blank) sheets at the beginning and end of a
book,
half
of
each pasted to the
inside
of
the
cover,
half
forming
a
flyleaf.
As
such they form
part
of
the binding rather than the
text.
If
endpapers
are
to have printing, such as illustrations or
figures,
those not
solely
decorative should be repeated within the
text.
This is because libraries
often

volume, not the series title, subtitle, or author's or publisher's name.
Its
verso
(p.
ii)
is
often
blank,
although it can hold publisher's announce-
ments, such as series title, list of other titles in the same
series,
other
titles
by
the same author, or
general
editors or
advisers;
exceptionally, it
can
hold a
frontispiece.
Some
books incorporate the half-title verso into
a
double-page spread
design
for the
title
page.

need to be printed on
glossy
art paper to reproduce the image
properly; this page is
then
tipped
in—fixed
to a page by a strip of paste
along
the inner vertical
edge—during
printing.
A
colour halftone must
always
be
tipped
in unless the entire work is printed on paper suitable
for
colour
images.
All frontispieces not entailing special paper are
printed on the same kind of paper as the
text.
Tipped-in frontispieces
are
unnumbered; those printed on
text
paper are numbered and in-
cluded in the pagination.

may not use the same quality of paper. For this reason
authors should avoid
cross-referring
to a frontispiece in
text.
1.2.4
Title
page
The
title
page—properly
full-title
page,
as
distinct
from
half-title
page—is
on
the first recto after the half-title (p. iii). It contains the full
title
and
subtitle of the work, volume
number
if
any,
name of the author(s) or
general
editor(s),
and the publisher's name (imprint). It

may
or
may
not be preceded
by
By,
or be followed by
degrees
or affiliations.
Joint authors need to
agree
on the order
of
their
names.
Authors can be
listed
in order of seniority, according to the
proportion
of material
contributed,
or alphabetically.
A
volume editor's name is preceded by
Edited
by,
Selected
and
edited
by,

is
also
referred to
as
the
full-title
verso,
copyright,
imprint,
or
biblio
page,
and
contains
the
essential
printing
and
publication
history
of
the work,
including
publisher's
imprint,
date
of
publication, publishing
history,
copyright

and
there
is
an
increasing desire among many publishers to make
them
less
clut-
tered.
Publisher's
imprint
A
publisher's
imprint
comprises the name of the publisher (or publishing
division
if
this
bears
a separate
name),
its
full
registered
address,
place
of
publication, and
date,
usually

5
Works set wholly in Latin have Latin imprints, in which the place of
publication is in the locative
form—for
example
Londinii
('at London'),
Oxonii
('at Oxford'),
Novi
Eboraci
('at New
York')—in
other
languages
the
nominative
has
tended to take
over:
Pans
for
'À
Paris',
Praha
for
'V
Praze',
etc.
Date

history
In
the
case
of
co-publication, the name and full
address
of
the publisher
of a
particular edition is stated first,
with
the name and city of
publica-
tion of
co-publishers
following. Thus the imprint page for a co-publica-
tion published in Great
Britain
would read:
Published
in Great Britain in
2002
by Oxford University
Press,
Great
Clarendon
Street,
Oxford
OX2

2002
by Oxford University
Press,
Oxford
Mention
should
be
made
of
subsequent publication
of
the
same
title, the
same
work
with
a different title, a later edition
with
additional content,
or the same work in translation.
Copyright
notices
Copyright notices take different forms depending on the country of
publication, and whether the work
is
an
original
edition,
reissue,

may
be
reproduced,
stored in a
retrieval
system,
or transmitted, in any
form
or by any
means,
without
the
prior
permission
in
writing
of Oxford University
Press,
or
as
expressly
permitted
by law, or under
terms
agreed
with
the appropriate reprographics
rights organization.
Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside the

of
moral
rights
Standardly,
this takes the form of
a
statement such as
The
moral
right
of [author's name] to be
identified
as
the author of this
work
has
been
asserted
in
accordance
with
the Copyright
Designs
and
Patents
Act
1988.
or simply
The
author's moral rights have been

format (second,
third, etc.), or
if
it becomes revised, enlarged, abridged, paperbacked, or
the like. An edition is distinct from a reprinting
that
contains no sub-
stantial alteration, which is an impression or reprint. In trade practice
the number of the edition is indicated as
1/e,
2/e,
3/e,
etc. or superscript
\
2
,
3
,
etc. following the title,
signifying
a
first,
second, third, etc. edition.
Any of these
three
forms can be used in bibliographical references,
providing it
is
imposed consistently.
An

a second or new impression
of
any
printed work,
with
only minor corrections; a
reimpression
with
no
corrections at
all;
or printed
matter
taken from some other publication
for
reproduction.
When
copy
is
centred, reprints can
be
indicated on the
title
verso by
a
centred line
of
alternating
figures,
normally one to ten

order.
More than nine reprints are indicated
by
higher
numbers.
Geographical
limitations
on
sales
The
sales
of some works may be circumscribed by geographical
areas.
CHAPTER
1
I
The
parts
of
a
book
7
Any
such limitations are denoted
by,
say,
For
sale
only
in

CIP
data cannot be altered in
any
way;
this includes the
Library
of
Congress's
US spelling of
cataloging.
Errors of fact can be corrected
only
with
written
permission from the
issuing
library.
International
Standard
Book
Number
(ISBN)
The
ISBN
is a unique number
assigned
to every edition of
every
book.
Thus a book will have one

(one to five
digits),
called the
Group
Identifier, identifies the national,
language,
or geographical area in
which the book is published. The Publisher Prefix (one to seven
digits)
identifies
the publisher. The Title
Number
(one to six
digits,
depending
on the number of
digits
preceding them) identifies the specific volume
or edition
of
a
work. The Check Digit
(always
one digit, 1-9 or
X
for ten)
is
used to check
that
the number

from
issue
to
issue.
If
the publication
is
composed
of
books,
as
with
some
series
monographs, each volume is
assigned
an
ISSN
as
well
as
an
ISBN.
The
ISBN
is printed on the same page as the work's copyright
notice, or
with
the instructions for ordering
publications.

The
parts
of a
book
|
CHAPTER
1
(American
Society
of
Composers,
Authors, and
Publishers),
BMI
(Broad-
cast
Music Incorporated), and
SESAC
(Society of European Songwriters,
Artists and Composers).
Printer's
and
binder's
names
and
locations
Some
publishers include the name
of
the printer and binder

is
of
most immediate use to anyone who wishes to
match the type.
1.2.6
Dedication
A
dedication is a
highly
personal item, for which no rules can be
given.
Commonly centred on the page, it is open to a variety of typographic
treatments, which should suit its subject and
satisfy
its author. Except
when a book is
part
of a
series,
there
is no reason why a dedication's
presentation may not vary between otherwise equivalent volumes.
When
adjusting prelims to fit the available space, a dedication's size
and
autonomy often
prompts
its relocation to a convenient
verso,
pref-

has
decided to include and to omit. It
is
also
the place for a brief acknowledgement to
colleagues
or
advisers
in
the absence
of
an
acknowledgements section.
A
preface may serve the same purpose for the editor of
a
multi-author
CHAPTER
1
I
The
parts
of
a
book
9
book, in which
case
it
is

Second
Edition,
Preface
to
the
Paperback
Edition,
Preface
to
the
Abndged
Edition,
Preface
to
the
Student's
Edition,
and so forth as appro-
priate.
Successive
editions are numbered consecutively and continue to
be placed in reverse numerical order. A collection of several prefaces
may
be distinguished further by adding dates:
Preface
to
the
Thirty-Ninth
Edition
(1983).

credit for another's aid or
thoughts—whether
or not the same
words are used to express
them.
The latter
is
a
legal
requirement, requir-
ing
a writer to obtain
permission—from
the
original
author or from his
or her publisher or copyright
holder—if
the writer quotes the author's
words (otherwise than covered by 'fair
dealing').
Acknowledging the
source of illustrations (figures, tables, diagrams, etc.) is a function of
stating
that
the writer has obtained permission to reproduce
them.
In
text
it is best to separate the two types of acknowledgement, in

of
Contents.
It records the
title
and beginning page number of
every
separ-
ately
titled section
that
follows it, including
all
lists
in the prelims, parts
and chapters, and all endmatter. It may list the
frontispiece,
but not the
dedication or epigraph.
Lists
are referred to
as
list
of—
in
the contents list even though their own
headings
are simply
Illustrations,
Abbreviations,
etc.