style.2

Handbook of Style

Italicization

The following are usually italicized in print and underlined in manuscript and typescript.
1. titles of books, magazines, newspapers, plays, movies, works of art, and long musical compositions (but not musical compositions identified by the nature of the musical form in which they were written)
< Eliot's The Waste Land >
< Saturday Review >
< Christian Science Monitor >
< Shakespeare's Othello >
< the movie High Noon >
< Gainsborough's Blue Boy >
< Mozart's Don Giovanni >
but
< Fantasy in C Minor >
NOTE: Plurals of such italicized titles have roman-type inflectional endings.
< hidden under a stack of Saturday Reviews >

2. names of ships and aircraft, and often spacecraft
< M. V. West Star >
< Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis >
< Apollo 13 >

3. words, letters, and figures when referred to as words, letters, and figures
< The word receive is often misspelled. >
< The g in align is silent. >
< You should dot your i's and cross your t' s. >
< The first 2 and the last 0 are barely legible. >

4. foreign words and phrases that have not been naturalized in English
< aere perennius >
< che sar¡, sar¡ >
< sans peur et sans reproche >
< ich dien >
but
< pasta >< ad hoc >
< ex officio >
NOTE: The decision as to whether or not a word or phrase has been naturalized in English will vary according to the subject matter and the expected audience of the passage in which it appears. In general, any word entered in the main A-Z vocabulary of this dictionary need not be italicized.

5. New Latin scientific names of genera, species, subspecies, and varieties (but not groups of higher rank, as phyla, classes, or orders) in botanical or zoological names
< a thick-shelled American clam (Mercenaria mercenaria) >
< a cardinal (Richmondena cardinalis) >
but
< the family Hominidae >

6. case titles in legal citations, both in full and shortened form (``v'' for ``versus'' is set in roman, though)
< Jones v. Massachusetts >
< the Jones case >
< Jones >