Have you heard the news? The 18th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style will be published in September! And . . . it’s YELLOW! It may seem hard to believe, but it’s been seven years since we published the 17th edition. The 18th edition will retain much of the core advice from the 17th while addressing an array of developments that directly affect how writers, editors, and publishers do their work.

Informed and shaped by a team of publishing professionals from both inside and outside the University of Chicago Press, the 18th edition will also reflect many of the suggestions, large and small, sent to us by our readers via the Q&A and other channels (including here at CMOS Shop Talk).

The full list of changes won’t be available right away; we’re busy making the text of the book final. We’ll also be busy over the next several months as we once again turn the contents of the book into a website and conform it to an updated design.

Meanwhile, here are some of the highlights, most of which were revealed at the twenty-eighth annual conference of ACES: The Society for Editing, held in San Diego earlier this month:

• A city or other place of publication will no longer be required when citing books (e.g., Pantheon Books, 2024, not New York: Pantheon Books, 2024).
• In titles of works, prepositions of five or more letters will now be capitalized (A Room with a View but Much Ado About Nothing). And we will now refer to this as title case rather than headline style.
• An initial The in the title of a newspaper or other periodical that includes one (as on a masthead or cover) will now be retained in running text (The New York Times and The American Naturalist but the Chicago Tribune and the American Journal of Sociology).
• Words derived from proper nouns but used in a nonliteral sense will now be capitalized according to the first-listed entries at Merriam-Webster.com. For example, the word french in french fries will remain lowercase (as in previous editions), whereas French dressing will now get a capital F.
• The first word of a grammatically complete sentence following a colon will now get an initial capital.
• The terms ebook and esports will join email as exceptions to the rule for hyphenating e-terms.
• We’ll clarify our rules relative to compound modifiers that follow a noun to allow for certain hyphenated exceptions. For example, though a well-read student is well read (no change to our current rules), a first-rate editor will remain first-rate after the noun. We’ll also clarify our rules for compound modifiers that may remain open before a noun, as the term guest room in guest room access.
• Our rules for en dashes will be expanded to include an additional category: The names of two or more people used as a compound modifier in certain terms will now be separated by an en dash rather than a hyphen; a hyphenated name, however, remains hyphenated (Epstein–Barr virus, named for two people, but Albers-Schönberg disease, named for one person).
• The generic singular they will now be considered acceptable even in formal writing—for example, when the antecedent is an indefinite pronoun (someone forgot their coat) or when referring to a person whose gender is unknown or irrelevant (will the driver of the yellow sedan please move their car) or whose identity must be concealed (the author wants their privacy protected). These generic uses complement the referential singular they, which we covered for the first time in the last edition relative to people who identify with they/them pronouns.

We will also be including new sections on Indigenous languages and sources as well as expanded guidance on accessibility and a thoroughly revised section on inclusive language. Our coverage has also been updated with considerations related to fiction and other creative genres wherever applicable. These and other changes are designed to bring our advice up to date while addressing how readers use the Manual.

Preorders and Online Access

If you’d like to preorder the hardcover edition, you can do so now at the University of Chicago Press’s website. Subscribers to CMOS Online will get the new online edition automatically in September, and all CMOS Online subscriptions will include access to the full contents of both the 18th and 17th editions (access to the online 16th edition will no longer be available).

We’ll post more updates as the publication date nears, so stay tuned!

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