Wikipedia:Use modern language

This is an essay on the Wikipedia:Manual of Style. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

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This page in a nutshell: An important aspect of writing encyclopedically is using broadly accessible, modern English (but not unpopular neologisms), rather than wording that will sound outmoded (or futuristic) to most readers, even if "standard" in your regional (or personal) idiom.

The Wikipedia Manual of Style offers a great deal of guidance on article writing. This essay explores in more depth a few points as they relate to contemporary Modern English language style versus archaic or neologistic usages, and makes some recommendations that go beyond the MOS "rules", based on actual cases encountered in Wikipedia articles.

Most Wikipedia readers are native speakers of dialects that have largely dispensed with obsolescent words and turns of phrase, while other readers have learned (or are still learning) English as a second language. It is important for these audiences that Wikipedians write articles in accessible, modern wording. Other audiences to consider are media organizations, students, bloggers, and others who may quote material from Wikipedia directly, to a more general secondary audience.

While your regional dialect may include, in daily speech and informal writing, some features of English that are considered archaic in most dialects, it is generally not a good idea to use them in Wikipedia articles, even when some of them may still be considered "proper" in some prescriptive grammar books or dictionaries, and even when writing about subjects that pertain to your region.

Likewise, the introduction of neologisms – terms and new usage patterns not (yet?) accepted into formal writing – will not help our readers.

Also, please remember that being excessively wordy, writing in a pedantic or condescending manner, or habitually using overly learned words when simpler ones will suffice, makes it more difficult to use the encyclopedia. (That said, en.wikipedia.org is not simple.wikipedia.org, and need not be "dumbed down".)

Direct quotations, of course, should always retain the original wording.

Some of the most obvious usages that today are too archaic or dialectal for encyclopedic use include but are not limited to:

• Whatever used alone: Avoid constructions like "Whatever, they relocated to Birmingham the following year". The more common, informal overusage of whatever to indicate indifference or uncertainty makes such a sentence jarring and confusing to modern readers, and should be replaced with something more specific: "Regardless of these problems, they relocated to Birmingham the following year" or "Whatever the case may have been, they relocated to Birmingham the following year", as the context requires. "In any case" and other constructions can also be substituted.
• Whomsoever and whosoever: Use whomever and whoever.
• Unbeknownst, unbeknown: Simple substitution of unknown is often awkward or ungrammatical. Rewrite to use unknown more appropriately, or use another construction: "unbeknownst to Johnson ..." could become "although Johnson was unaware of it ...", "behind Johnson's back ..." etc., depending on the context. Like "whatsoever", "unbeknownst" has some vestigial currency in journalism and fiction, but isn't a word that non-fluent speakers are likely to be familiar with.
• Other uses of archaic -st, -est and -eth constructions: Words like canst, knowest and cometh are essentially extinct, not just obsolescent, and are not likely to appear in WP articles anyway, other than in titles (e.g. The Iceman Cometh) and direct quotations, where they must not be modified, of course. Note: Although they can safely be replaced with among and while, amongst and whilst are still commonly used in British English.
• Oftentimes, ofttimes: Use often, frequently, commonly, etc.
• Oft-: Use often, frequently, commonly, etc.; or a different construction, such as common story for oft-repeated tale
• Out-of-doors: Use outdoor as an adjective, [the] outdoors as the noun.
• Use of he, him, his, man, and other masculine terminology generically (as in "the player may then make his closing move"): Rewrite to avoid these constructions, which are broadly and increasingly interpreted as sexist. See also Wikipedia:Gender-neutral language.
• Use of awkward double pronouns for gender neutrality: Rewrite to avoid the need for such contortions as his/her or (s)he. While still common informally, this practice is sloppy, redundant and non-encyclopedic. See also Wikipedia:Gender-neutral language.
• Use of upon when on will suffice. There are few instances of phrases in forms like "depended upon" or "thinking upon", in which "upon" cannot be replaced with "on". The "upon" construction is principally poetic (e.g. "wish upon a star"), but remains common in poor attempts at formal English. The surviving worthwhile use of "upon" is as a replacement for awkward phrases such as many (but not all) uses of "[up] on top of" (e.g., "she climbed upon the table" vs. "she climbed on top of the table").
• Spake: Obsolete except in poetry; use spoke.
• Morrow: Now rarely used except in poetry. Use another construction, such as next day, following morning etc.
• Eve: Likewise, use eve with caution, such as in established holiday names or in its figurative sense ("on the eve of victory", though verge and other terms are good substitutes), but not as a general substitute for evening or night.
• Use of Latin forms when these have been largely supplanted by native English suffixes: For example, use forums not fora; broadly recognized exceptions are loci in scientific contexts, literary appendices, communications or artistic media, and many technical, medical, and legal jargon terms.
• Possessed of: Use having/had, possessing, etc. Something like "being possessed of a keen business sense" is much clearer and less stilted when rewritten as "having a keen business sense".
• Hyphenation of terms that are now fully compounded in Modern English: Use inline skating, not in-line skating, today, not to-day. But note that online (sometimes stressed as ON-line) and on-line (stressed as on-LINE) are actually different terms; the former means "connected to a computer network", while the latter means "connected to a power source" and also has some figurative meanings of "operational; completely functional", as in "our new business model is finally on-line".
• Hyphenation of standard suffixes just because they would result in doubled letters: Use tailless, not tail-less. Prefixes are generally a matter of variety of English (pre-eminent and preeminent are both current usage).
• Use of periods (dots) at the end of constructions no longer interpreted as abbreviations in English: E.g., replace per cent. or percent. with per cent or percent.
• Use of periods in acronyms and initialisms – use AWOL, NORAD and UK, not A.W.O.L., N.O.R.A.D. and U.K. Note that some (especially American) editors prefer to use "U.S." in reference to the United States, even when they would use "UK" and "AWOL" in the same paragraph; as of October 2011^[update] this remains contentious. In the interim, follow
  WP:Manual of Style (abbreviations)
  for more detail on acronyms and initialisms.
• Use of slashes (strokes) in acronyms and initialisms, except in the rare cases where this usage remains overwhelmingly the most common, as with n/a ("not applicable") and c/o ("care of"). Normally, use all-caps like NORAD or periods like i.e., per
  WP:Manual of Style (abbreviations)
  .
• All-capitals presentation of words that were originally acronyms or initialisms but which are no longer interpreted as such by the vast majority of speakers/readers. Use scuba vs. SCUBA, and laser vs. LASER or worse yet L.A.S.E.R..
• Obsolete abbreviations, such as &c. for etc.
• Use of diacritics in English words (as opposed to proper names) to disambiguate pronunciation: E.g., coöperation, learnèd. This practice was almost extinct by the early 1970s, and has long since fallen into obscurity, as the words and their pronunciations are clear through familiarity and context. Personal name and trademark spellings like José, Nestlé, Cēpacol etc., are to be respected, of course (but see also the Wikipedia
  guideline
  on trademarks), as are unassimilated foreign words like brüt in winemaking.
• Non-standard contractions, especially those formerly used in poetry. These were most commonly used to distinguish pronunciations (such as between learn'd and learnéd) for reading aloud, and are still sometimes used in sheet music for this purpose.
  Wikipedia is not a songbook
  . These spellings should be retained if quoting sheet music, however. There are non-poetic examples such as 'bus (for omnibus), now simply bus.
• Use of diacritics in loanwords that have become completely assimilated into English: E.g., use debut not début, role not rôle, naive not naïve, precis not précis. Especially do not do this for words that have common English-only derived forms, such as debuting, roleplaying and naivety (and avoid the French loanword naïveté, since there is an English version). More examples include bric-a-brac, debacle, depot, detour, and regime, as well as various basic cooking terms like saute. Obvious exceptions are résumé, exposé, lamé and pâté, since they are completely different words in English without the diacritics. A few other words such as attaché, cliché, cloisonné, fête, mêlée, papier-mâché, protégé and raison d'être are frequently but not mandatorily spelled with diacritics, since they are perfectly intelligible without them. Avoid diacritics with most -ee words in particular, which already have a long-established history in English without the embellishment: financee, matinee, soiree. For these purposes also consider ligatures a form of diacritic, and never use them in assimilated terms like hors-d'oeuvre, foetus, manoeuvre.
• Italicization of loanwords that are now fully incorporated into English: Terms like rendezvous, corps, versus and teriyaki (and debut, role, naive, precis, etc., as above) do not need to be italicized in running prose. Contrast terms like élan, esprit de corps, Weltanschauung, and la Raza, which have not been fully assimilated, and are not likely to be interpreted as English by native English speakers. Food names may be in either category; sushi need not be italicized, but unagi (freshwater eel), anago (sea eel) and tako (octopus) should be; burrito, taco (the Mexican dish, not the cactus) and enchilada have been assimilated, but chicharrones (pork rinds), chorizo (spicy sausage) and posole/pozole (hominy, pork & chile stew) have not, except arguably in the U.S. Southwest, Florida and Belize (i.e., the fully-understood usage in English is confined to too small an area for such terms to be broadly considered assimilated and their italicization dropped).
  edit-warring
  over the issue breaks out: perhaps in Australia and New Zealand, for example, taco and burrito are assimilated, but enchilada is not. Some of the more common words listed as examples of assimilated and not italicized by the MHRA Style Guide include: avant-garde, debris, denouement, dilettante, ennui, genre, leitmotif, milieu, par excellence, salon, status quo and vice versa. Older editions of The Guardian Style-book which are specific on the matter include many others, the most obvious of which are addendum/addenda, aide-de-camp, appendix/appendices, apropos, axis/axes, basis/bases, bayonet, connoisseur, concessionaire, cul-de-sac, desiderata, en masse, en route, ex officio, facsimile, garotte, gratis, hors-d'oeuvre, innuendo, laissez-faire, libretto/libretti, literati, khaki, manifesto, memorandum/memoranda, premise, pro forma, proviso, quartet (and quintet, septet, trio, etc.), questionnaire, racquet, ricochet, savant, sheikh, sobriquet, sotto voce, stratum/strata, sub rosa, thesis/theses, and veldt. If in further doubt, perhaps consult The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors. Another hint that may be useful though not terribly reliable is spell-checking software; if a singular, single-word foreign term is flagged as unrecognized, this may be an indication that it should be italicized (this trick often does not work with plurals or multiple-word or hyphenated terms).
• Italicization of Latin-derived abbreviations that are very common in Modern English: Commonplace cases like etc., i.e., e.g., c./ca., and vs. (or v. in legal contexts) should not be italicized. Less common ones, such as q.e.d. and op. cit. should be italicized (and linked at first occurrence, for the benefit of readers unfamiliar with them). Various style guides disagree on exactly which should and should not be in italics; if in doubt, italicize, and don't edit-war over it if someone removes the italics.
  • Op. cit. and ibid should be replaced by more stable and accessible means of indicating a repeated source (see Wikipedia:Citing sources § Repeated citations).
• Italicization of legal terms, when used in a legal context. Legal writing does not italicize (or use diacritics with) cy pres, estoppel, habeas corpus, modus operandi, etc. Use outside of the legal context should follow the recommendations above (e.g. modus operandi and post mortem have been assimilated into everyday English, cy prés has not, prima facie is borderline).
• Formerly common transliterations of foreign words and names which are now transliterated differently in general English usage: E.g. amok, Mumbai and Beijing, not amuck, Bombay and Peking, except where historically/culturally significant and appropriate (i.e., do not rewrite history).
• Obsolete holiday names or spellings thereof: E.g., use Halloween, not All Hallow's Eve or Hallowe'en (but again, do not rewrite history).
• Fame and famous as negatives: Use infamy and infamous.
• German-style capitalization of nouns that are not proper names: While it once was common in English – well into the early 20th century in some areas – it is no longer appropriate at all to write something like "Smith's Cat was eaten by his Dog". Some narrow specialties like ornithology have a tendency to use such capitalization in the common (vernacular) names of species, but Wikipedia does not do this,
  common nouns
  should be lower-cased on sight, unless and until a preponderance of the evidence shows that the term in question is not only uniformly capitalized in formal publications in the field to which it pertains but also in mainstream generalist works such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, newspapers, etc.
• May have in reference to the hypothetical past: Use could have or might have. May have was formerly commonly used to refer to past events with a hypothetical but no longer possible conditional, as in "if the Administration's response had been faster, the public reaction may have been less negative". This usage is now confusing to many readers, for whom may is exclusively taken to indicate genuine possibility ("paid conscripts rather than slaves may have built the Egyptian pyramids"), not a pure what-if.
• Essentially extinct terms/spellings from Middle and Early Modern English: Examples include whither, thither, forthwith, ere, thrice and twain.
• Words that are on the way out: Whence, nigh, thence. These sound stuffy, and are rare enough that readers with less exposure to English will be less familiar with them. (See downward trend in books on Google Ngram Viewer.)
• Similarly, words that do, but only barely, survive in Modern English: Some words and spellings aren't quite extinct because of their presence in well-known sayings or quotations, but have virtually no modern use outside those contexts. A few familiar examples include hither, yon, alack, and wherefore.
• A- prefixing: In verbs (as in "after his divorce, the mayor went a-courting for a new love interest"), this has long been used in poetry and song, popularly at least as recently as
  Wikipedia is not
  a tabloid, children's book or pop song, so the usage is inappropriate here. In adjectives, it should be uniformly avoided when an alternative construction exists (e.g., use tilted in place of atilt, use on fire or burning instead of ablaze or afire or aflame, and so on). In some cases, such a word remained current well into the early 20th century (e.g. appertain for pertain), with the result that such a word may appear by default in a Wikipedia article based on the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, and should be replaced. In a handful of cases (e.g. akimbo) there is no cognate equivalent, but passages that use them can usually be rewritten more clearly anyway. All these non-encyclopedic cases should not be confused with the negative a- in asymptomatic and asexual, nor with some of the fully compounded cases, such as around, ahold and await, which have formed words with completely distinct meanings from the bases to which the a- is attached.
• Long-winded expressions of very simple relationships: Unless the result would be ambiguous, use for instead of for the purpose of, use to instead of in order to, and so on. Example of ambiguity: "they fought the new requirements [in order] to conserve fuel"; without "in order", it would be unclear if there was a fight to conserve fuel, against fuel-inefficient requirements, or a fight against requirements that call for conserving fuel. Nevertheless, such a phrase can also simply be rewritten to avoid the construction ("they fought the new fuel conservation requirements", or "to conserve fuel, they fought the new requirements", as appropriate).
• Yoda-esque grammar. There are many possible examples of mixed-up, obfuscatory word order that should be avoided. One of the most common is the excessively poetic prefixing of forms of to have, as in "Had the Administration a faster response, the public reaction could have been less negative." Rewrite to avoid such constructions, which are often confusing for non-fluent English readers: "If the Administration's response had been faster, the public reaction could have been less negative." Have-prefixing is common in poetry and song ("Have yourself a merry little Christmas", "Baa-baa black sheep, have you any wool?"), but not appropriate in encyclopedic writing. Another example to avoid is placement of the subject and verb (even worse, in inverted order, again from poetic uses like "a jolly old soul was he") after the object: "the company's chief executive he was, from 2002 to 2006" or "the company's chief executive was he, from 2002 to 2006".
• Confusing "corrections" of split-infinitives: Despite split infinitives being a natural feature of English, many
  prescriptive grammarians find them distracting, even offensive, especially in formal writing. The typical but sometimes archaic and faulty solution is simply to move the inserted modifier to before the infinitive (as in "simply to move" in this sentence, instead of "to simply move"). This often results in ambiguous or even inaccurate or nonsensical passages. When rewritten, split infinitives must be handled carefully, on a case-by-case basis. "She wanted to simply go to the store" can arguably be changed to "She wanted simply to go to the store", although this would be much better as "she simply wanted to go to the store" (it is the circumstance that is simple, not the mental process). On the other hand, "he went home to quietly reflect on the day" cannot be handled in this manner, as "he went home quietly to reflect on the day" has a completely different meaning, describing his manner of going, not of his reflection. A better rewrite would be "he went home to reflect quietly on the day". A comma-laden version preserving the rather Victorian modifier-first structure – "he went home, quietly to reflect on the day" – is excessively flowery, and the subtle difference will be lost on many readers who will mistake it for the same thing as the comma-free version. It is notable that recent editions of The Chicago Manual of Style
  have abandoned the recommendation that split infinitives always be avoided, on the principle that the most clearly understandable construction is the one that should be used. This principle is obviously one that can be applied to writing an encyclopedia. If an edit-war erupts over a split infinitive, rewrite the passage, without changing the underlying meaning, to make the dispute moot.
• Overuse of commas: English before the 20th century frequently made use of many more commas than modern prose. Today, commas are generally only used a) to indicate a natural brief pause, and b) to disambiguate passages that would be confusing without them. Victorian-style comma usage (which can even be found in the text of many 1911 Britannica articles imported into Wikipedia, where they have yet to be significantly rewritten) was often between any clauses simply because they were clauses, regardless of actual reading flow. This is unhelpful for our readers. Comma usage has to be balanced (see below for post-Internet excessive avoidance of commas).
• Melodramatic euphemisms for death:
  Gothic novelists
  . Simply use died, unless something more specific is warranted (e.g., was murdered or committed suicide etc.).
• Mixture of present and preterite in compound verbs: Instead of constructions like "the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya is ended" use something like "ended in October 2011" with no auxiliary verb.
• Use of cutesy, obscure alternative terms in an attempt to sound more learned or clever, e.g. yarn and raconteur for story and storyteller. This practice was once almost overwhelmingly common in newspaper headlines, but is declining even there, though it remains common in editorial journalism (which often even invents "words", like ballsman for football player), especially in biographical articles. Via emulation of journalistic writing, it appears frequently enough in Wikipedia to be a problem. It isn't encyclopedic, and is a clear example of Victorianesque verbosity and archness for their own sakes.
• A tortured construction to avoid ending a sentence in a preposition, like "for problems of which to be aware". Preposition stranding has always been a part of English.
• making a cross-reference
  is useful.

• Irregular compounds: A few words are curiously "over-compounded" in standard English and are so confusing to many readers and editors that they are frequently de-compounded because they are mistaken for typographical errors. In virtually every case, they can easily be replaced with other words, and are best avoided on Wikipedia: While not fully obsolete (yet?), the usage is confusing to many readers who are not fully fluent. Some examples include albeit, notwithstanding (use aside [from]) and moreover (use in addition, additionally, also, etc.), as well as whomsoever and whatsoever (detailed above). Two exceptions so common that they do not need to be avoided are nevertheless and nonetheless, yet there isn't a compelling reason to use them either, as they can be replaced with "regardless" and various other terms easily without any loss of meaning.
• Compounds in transition: Many examples of compounds remain in transition, and different writers hyphenate or completely merge them, such as co-operation and cooperation, or re-establish and reestablish. In some cases, these are largely matters of UK versus US usage, and should be
  handled just like any other such matter of English language variation. In other cases, such as website vs. web site (more properly Web site), and taskforce vs. task-force or task force, it is a matter of personal or peer-group-collective preference. In either case, be wary of changing such an example to your own preferred spelling, as this may result in very pointless edit-warring. The simplest way to settle any such dispute is to agree to use the version best attested in refereed/peer-reviewed journals (in fields in which the term in question is not a term-of-art with one commonly accepted spelling). Such transitional compounds, which frequently arise in technology and business contexts, differ from the outright neologistic compounds (covered in the "Examples of undesirable new practices
  " section, above) in that they are commonly found in professionally edited publications, as are their uncompounded and sometimes their hyphenated counterparts (i.e. disparate views on what is standard usage), while the neologistic variety are common only on blogs, Web pages and other media without editorial oversight (i.e. non-standard usage by most accounts, even if consensus on that may be shifting).
• Eponyms: Capitalization of
  WP:UNIT for more detail.) If the term has shifted spelling away from the original name, it is not capitalized, as in martini
  , formerly the "Martinez cocktail".
• The
  indicative mood
  can be used without awkwardness, prefer it. If use of subjunctive is reverted more than once, this is a strong indication that the passage needs to be rewritten one way or another because it is distracting and confusing various readers.
• Waning units of measurement and numeric terms: Some near-obsolete units survive, but only with limited application. For example,
  grains, pennyweights, and so on, almost entirely limited to specialized contexts such as nautical usage, cooking and bar-tending, or jewelry-making. Such terms should not be used outside the context in which they regularly survive in current publications, and arguably they should be avoided entirely in favor of more common units when this would not be unduly jarring to readers experienced in the field in question. When used, they should be parenthetically converted into their metric and imperial/customary equivalents (see Template:Convert) and the unit linked to the article about the unit. Example: 20 [[Stone (mass)|stone]] ({{convert|280|lb|kg|sigfig=3|abbr=on}}). Some units such as cubits
  are entirely obsolete, and should not be used outside of quotations or discussion of the units themselves.