Does “the” get italics?

Does “the” get italics?

One of the idiosyncrasies of copy editing that befuddles me involves the word “the”. Should it be capitalized and italicized when one refers to newspaper titles in a piece of writing?

The Chicago Manual of Style will tell you no. Its advice, which I always have to recheck to be sure, is that:

When newspapers and periodicals are mentioned in text, an initial the, even if it is part of the official title, is lowercased (unless it begins a sentence) and not italicized.

CMOS illustrates with a hometown example: “She reads the Chicago Tribune on the train.”

Something nags at me though. Isn’t the “the” part of the title? If you look at the mastheads of newspapers, from Seattle to Boston to Atlanta, you’ll often find “the” capitalized, in blackletter gothic font. So why not treat it that way?

Puzzling over this, I’ve come up with four reasons. One is that “the” is omitted when another article or a possessive is used. We write “a Chicago Tribune reporter” and “her New York Times (that is, her copy), but never “a The Chicago Tribune reporter” or “her The New York Times.” Ugh. And when we write something like “the Boston Globe story that won the Pulitzer,” the “the” is modifying “story” not Boston Globe. Since the titular “the” drops away in such cases, it would create confusion (and a lot of work) to sometimes italicize it and sometimes not.

In addition, not all newspapers use a “The” in their mastheads. Take a look at the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Arizona Republic, all of which eschew “The.” It would be confusing to italicize “the” for some newspapers and not for others—and writers would need to look up which is which. That’s too much.

Then there is the index factor. When you create a book index containing lots of titles that begin with “the”, that little word is conveniently suppressed. Otherwise, the section of the index beginning with “the” would be large, unwieldy, and simply ridiculous. Omitting italics and capitals in the main text and in references is consistent with the necessary suppression of “The” in indexes.

And finally consider the fact that many other names of institutions, bands, bits of topography or geography, like the Rolling Stones, the White House, the Washington Monument, the Pyrenees, the Great Lakes, the Capitol, and so on all use a lowercase “the.”

Occasionally we find exceptions where “The” is capitalized as part of a name such as The Hague (a city in the Netherlands) or The Dalles (a city in Oregon) or The Ukraine (back when it was a Soviet region rather than an independent state). But such exceptions are few and far between. “The” is generally lowercase.

One prominent exception is The Ohio State University, which insists on the “The” being present and capitalized. Presumably it does not wish be confused with other OSUs, like Oklahoma State University or Oregon State University. The institution has been using a “The” for many years and even trademarked “The” in 2022. Unfazed, The Chicago Manual of Style, writes that it “disregards such outliers for the sake of consistency with other such names.”

You’ll notice that in the last sentence, The Chicago Manual of Style got both italics and capitals. According to them, that’s because “The” is part of a book title, so the first word is capitalized and the italics extend through the title.

Perhaps the New York Times should look into this.

Featured image by Gabriele de Sanctis via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

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