Question about capitalization of ordinal numbers in titles
2008 October 6
When writing out an ordinal number in a formal title (such as in a liturgical book, or, for my purposes, on the cover of a service folder), is the part of the number after the hyphen capitalized? For example, is it properly “The Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity,” or “The Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity”?
I’ve seen it both ways, and many books simply cheat by putting the whole title in caps. Sneaky, eh? My Chicago Manual of Style would probably help, but it’s at home, alas, and I won’t be there for some time. The Google doesn’t want to give up the answer without a fight for which I have no strength. So, grammatical experts, help a pastor out, will you?
Related posts:
- Numbers and my stupid brain Am I the only one that can’t remember the numbers...
- Google’s Cloud of Glory Sweet! Google Docs now works offline, via Google Gears. Now...
- Synchronicity I mentioned on Twitter recently that I have achieved a...
- For me He slays His Son? Pastor William Weedon on his excellent blog had a very...
3 Responses
leave one →
According to Garner’s “Dictionary of Modern American Usage,” in titles you capitalize both words in hyphenated compounds (such as nineteenth-century or anti-idealist), but don’t capitalize after the hyphen in hyphenated single words (such as re-enlistment or fifty-fourth).
This is one I don’t remember learning in school and my (non-AP) style book is silent on the subject.
Luckily, my daughter’s 6th grade A Beka grammar book just reviewed capitalization rules. The text states: the second part of the hyphenated number is not capitalized.
Perfect! It makes so much sense now – the number is all one word, and so only the first letter of the number gets capitalized. Danke!