Wiktionary:Entry titles

This is a Wiktionary policy, guideline or common practices page. Specifically it is a policy think tank, working to develop a formal policy.

Policies – Entries: CFI - EL - NORM - NPOV - QUOTE - REDIR - DELETE. Languages: LT - AXX. Others: BLOCK - BOTS - VOTES.

Shortcut:
WT:TITLE

On Wiktionary, entry titles should normally be the same as the word, term or phrase being defined. However, to avoid duplication and inconsistent formatting, some norms are necessary:

Capitalization

Entries that do not usually start with a capital unless the first word of a sentence should not have an initial capital letter. For example Wiktionary has an entry for God as well as for god as this is often capitalized, but not Realize for realize as this is only ever capitalized as the first word of a sentence, or in the title of a piece of work, etc.

This guideline can have exceptions. For example in informal contexts such as Internet forums it's quite normal to drop all capital letters, such as england for England. Conversely in older English works it's common to capitalize important nouns, such as Hatred for hatred. Entries should only be included with both capitalizations when both are sufficiently common; see for example anglophone and Anglophone.

Punctuation

Commas (,) are generally allowed in entry titles. These are normally only used for phrases and proverbs. Question marks (?) and exclamation marks (!) are usually not allowed in page titles, but can be used in headwords.

The character ' (U+0027 APOSTROPHE) is used for the apostrophe rather than ’ (U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK). In most languages, the character - (U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS) is used for the hyphen rather than other dashes.

Capitalization

Punctuation

See also