The Chicago Manual of Style Q&A has been posting answers to your questions since way back in 1997, when it was known as the “FAQ (and not so FAQ).” Most of these questions and answers have remained online, in a free, searchable archive that has grown to more than a third of a million words. That’s roughly the same size as the 18th edition of CMOS (not counting the index).
To make this archive continue to work as intended—as a companion to CMOS that clarifies the finer points of Chicago style—we’ve once again combed through the answers and updated them as needed.
Sometimes this meant updating links; other times it meant revising the text to conform to the latest principles of Chicago style. Let’s look at some examples.
From CMOS 17 to CMOS 18
For starters, we updated all references to the 17th edition to refer to the 18th edition instead. For example, a question about the Wright brothers that we’d also updated for the previous edition now links to paragraph 8.37 in the 18th edition instead of 8.36 in the 17th:
Q. When referring to Orville and Wilbur Wright as a unit, should the word “brothers” be capitalized—Wright brothers vs. Wright Brothers?
A. According to CMOS 8.37, “A kinship name is usually lowercased unless it is used as part of a personal name or in place of a personal name.” One of the examples at 8.37 is “the Brontë sisters,” who, though none of them lived to see the age of modern aviation, provide a perfect analogy in terms of capitalization: Write “the Wright brothers.”
The words quoted from CMOS have been adjusted to reflect changes there (the 18th edition adds “usually” to account for title case and other exceptions, and the subject of the sentence has been recast in the singular). Plus, the word following the colon—Write—now gets a capital W, in line with our updated advice at CMOS 6.67.
Most of these changes should be self-evident. Sometimes, however, we thought it would be helpful to be more explicit about how Chicago style has evolved. In those cases, we added an “editor’s update” rather than simply revising the answer:
Q. I checked throughout CMOS and found not a single mention of the interrobang. How could there not even be a single mention of such an intriguing punctuation option?!
A. And we don’t mention smiley faces, either! But some of us are keeping a list for the next edition.
[Editor’s update: Smiley faces are now mentioned in the usage glossary in chapter 5, under “emoji; emoticon.” See also CMOS 10.78 (which features an actual smiley face). No interrobangs yet, but here’s one to tide you over: ‽ (that’s Unicode 203D for those keeping score).]
We hope that these and all our latest updates to the Q&A archive will help you stay as up to date with Chicago style as possible.
If you subscribe to CMOS Online, you can click through to the linked sections and find out what the Manual has to say. If you don’t have a subscription, we offer a 30-day free trial. If you have the book, you can turn to the relevant section there.
For those of you who are new to CMOS Online and the Q&A, here are some pointers.
Navigating the Archive
The Q&A may not be an LLM, but it’s a lot to navigate. Here are two main ways to find what you’re looking for:
1. Browse by topic. From any page in the Q&A, choose “Browse Q&A” from the menu. Then choose a topic—for example, “Commas” or “Usage and Grammar.” The Q&A on the Wright brothers is under “Proper Names”; the one asking about the interrobang is under “Punctuation.”
2. Search the archive. From any page at CMOS Online, enter a term in the Search box. For example, entering “smiley” will return results in two separate tabs—the first one for the Manual and the next one for the Q&A. (Individual subscribers may also see tabs for their notes and style sheets and for the CMOS users forum.)
The tab for the Manual should show the result from the glossary at CMOS 5.254:
Under the Q&A tab, you’ll find the “FAQ Item”—which is how our database reports individual Q&A pairs (a throwback to the original name of the feature):
Clicking on the red text in either tab will take you to your destination.* (Your search term may also refer you to a relevant post here at CMOS Shop Talk, which will be listed under the Q&A tab.)
Submitting a Question
You, too, can add to our archive: From any Q&A page, choose “Submit a Question” from the top menu. Though we can’t promise to answer every question we receive, many questions will get individual answers, and some will be featured on our site.
To find out what’s been featured, be sure to return to the Q&A every month for the latest answers to your questions. To get a monthly Q&A alert, sign up here.
In the meantime, happy browsing.
* You may have noticed that our search for “smiley” didn’t directly return paragraph 10.78 (the one mentioned in the Q&A). That’s because the emoji is listed there under its Unicode name, “smiling face” (or specifically, “smiling face with smiling eyes”). In most other cases, related words will be included in your results (e.g., hyphen will find hyphens, hyphenate, hyphenates, hyphenated, hyphenating, and hyphenation). For more info, see our “Search Tips” page.
Smiley face in the clouds by frenta / Adobe Stock.
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