Ask an Editor
Capitalization
Q: Can you explain why you are capitalizing "Internet" and "Ethernet"? Seems like an odd decision. And why, then, is "intranet" not capitalized?
--Carl
United States
A: Short answer: We capitalize nouns that we consider to be proper nouns or parts of proper nouns ("Internet" and "Ethernet," for example, or "House" in "House of Lords" and "the White House"), and we lowercase nouns we consider to be common nouns ("intranet," for example, or "house" in "We bought a house--a white house, in fact"). Most dictionaries and style guides agree that "Internet," when it refers to the worldwide network of interconnected smaller networks, is a proper noun and should be capitalized. The same goes for "Ethernet": Originally a Xerox trademark, it is the name of a technology standardized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Reference works also generally agree on "intranet," a generic term for an organization's internal network.
Longer answer: It can sometimes be difficult to tell whether a word is a proper noun or not, particularly in the technology realm. For example, when a phrase is typically represented by an abbreviation--"IM," for instance, short for "instant message"--people love to capitalize the spelled-out form ("Instant Message") whether or not it is a proper noun. (We try to avoid such temptation, ourselves.) And sometimes you will find that authoritative reference works disagree on how a term should be treated. The names of technology protocols such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Internet Protocol (IP), for instance, are capitalized by many dictionaries and organizations, but not all. At Yahoo! we capitalize protocols like these, as well as markup languages--"Hypertext Markup Language" (HTML) and "Extensible Markup Language" (XML), for example--and most technology standards and specifications, such as "MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3" (MP3) and "Cascading Style Sheets" (CSS). And although we capitalize "Cascading Style Sheets," we don't capitalize "style sheet" when referring to a CSS document; similarly, we capitalize "Web" in "the Web" and "the World Wide Web" but lowercase derived, generic terms like "webpage" and "website."
To decide whether a term is a proper noun or not, we recommend researching the term first--especially to see whether it's proprietary. For making decisions on how to treat technology words, we favor sites like W3C and the IEEE, in addition to dictionaries and style guides. When such sources conflict, you'll want to consider a number of factors--for example, whether you already have a style for a similar term or for a category of terms that the new one falls into--and then take a stand for your own website, so that you can treat the term consistently.
For more ideas on how to decide on a style for new terms, see Chapter 19 of "The Yahoo! Style Guide"--in particular the sidebar "Word List Resources" on page 434.
--Heather Hutson
Managing editor, "The Yahoo! Style Guide"
Longer answer: It can sometimes be difficult to tell whether a word is a proper noun or not, particularly in the technology realm. For example, when a phrase is typically represented by an abbreviation--"IM," for instance, short for "instant message"--people love to capitalize the spelled-out form ("Instant Message") whether or not it is a proper noun. (We try to avoid such temptation, ourselves.) And sometimes you will find that authoritative reference works disagree on how a term should be treated. The names of technology protocols such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Internet Protocol (IP), for instance, are capitalized by many dictionaries and organizations, but not all. At Yahoo! we capitalize protocols like these, as well as markup languages--"Hypertext Markup Language" (HTML) and "Extensible Markup Language" (XML), for example--and most technology standards and specifications, such as "MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3" (MP3) and "Cascading Style Sheets" (CSS). And although we capitalize "Cascading Style Sheets," we don't capitalize "style sheet" when referring to a CSS document; similarly, we capitalize "Web" in "the Web" and "the World Wide Web" but lowercase derived, generic terms like "webpage" and "website."
To decide whether a term is a proper noun or not, we recommend researching the term first--especially to see whether it's proprietary. For making decisions on how to treat technology words, we favor sites like W3C and the IEEE, in addition to dictionaries and style guides. When such sources conflict, you'll want to consider a number of factors--for example, whether you already have a style for a similar term or for a category of terms that the new one falls into--and then take a stand for your own website, so that you can treat the term consistently.
For more ideas on how to decide on a style for new terms, see Chapter 19 of "The Yahoo! Style Guide"--in particular the sidebar "Word List Resources" on page 434.
--Heather Hutson
Managing editor, "The Yahoo! Style Guide"
Published on Thursday, July 22, 2010