The headline is the text at the top of a newspaper article, indicating the nature of the article below it.

It is sometimes termed a news hed, a deliberate misspelling that dates from production flow during hot type days, to notify the composing room that a written note from an editor concerned a headline and should not be set in type.

Production of headlines[link]

The New York Times uses an unusually large headline to announce the Armistice with Germany at the end of World War I.

A headline's purpose is to quickly and briefly draw attention to the story. It is generally written by a copy editor, but may also be written by the writer, the page layout designer, or other editors. The most important story on the front page above the fold may have a larger headline if the story is unusually important. The New York Times's 21 July 1969 front page stated, for example, that "MEN WALK ON MOON", with the four words in gigantic size spread from the left to right edges of the page.^[1]

The film The Shipping News has an illustrative exchange between the protagonist, who is learning how to write for a local newspaper, and his publisher:

Publisher: It's finding the center of your story, the beating heart of it, that's what makes a reporter. You have to start by making up some headlines. You know: short, punchy, dramatic headlines. Now, have a look, [pointing at dark clouds gathering in the sky over the ocean] what do you see? Tell me the headline.

Protagonist: HORIZON FILLS WITH DARK CLOUDS?

Publisher: IMMINENT STORM THREATENS VILLAGE.

Protagonist: But what if no storm comes?

Publisher: VILLAGE SPARED FROM DEADLY STORM.

In the United States, headline contests are sponsored by the American Copy Editors Society, the National Federation of Press Women, and many state press associations.

Unusual headlines[link]

A number of newspapers use humour, puns, alliteration or other word play devices in their headlines. Equally, the need to keep headlines brief occasionally leads to unintentional double meanings, if not double entendres. For example, if the story is about the president of Iraq trying to acquire weapons, the headline might be IRAQI HEAD SEEKS ARMS, or if some agricultural legislation is defeated in the United States House of Representatives, the title could read FARMER BILL DIES IN HOUSE.

• WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG – Variety on Black Monday (1929)
• STICKS NIX HICK PIX – Variety writing that rural moviegoers preferred urban films (1935)
• DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN – Chicago Tribune reporting the wrong election winner (1948)
• FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD – New York Daily News reporting the denial of a federal bailout for bankrupt New York City (1975)
• HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR – New York Post on a local murder (1983)
• SAM SLEEPS! – New York Post over a front-page picture of mass-murderer David Berkowitz ("Son of Sam") asleep in his jail cell.^[2]
• SICK TRANSIT'S GLORIOUS MONDAY – New York Daily News reporting a state transit bailout (1980)^[3]
• GOTCHA! – The UK Sun on the torpedoing of the Argentine ship Belgrano and sinking of a gunboat during the Falklands War (1982)
• FREDDIE STARR ATE MY HAMSTER – The UK Sun (1986), claiming that the comedian had eaten a fan's pet hamster in a sandwich. The story was later proven false, but is seen as one of the classic tabloid newspaper headlines.^[4]
• GREAT SATAN SITS DOWN WITH THE AXIS OF EVIL – The Times (UK) on US-Iran talks (2007)^[5]
• SUPER CALEY GO BALLISTIC CELTIC ARE ATROCIOUS – Sun on Inverness Caledonian Thistle beating Celtic in the Scottish Cup^[6]

While editor of The New Republic, Michael Kinsley began a contest to find the most boring newspaper headline.^[7] According to him, no entry surpassed the one that had inspired him to create the contest: "WORTHWHILE CANADIAN INITIATIVE", over a column by The New York Times' Flora Lewis.^[8]

See also[link]

• The lead paragraph
• Headlines (from The Tonight Show with Jay Leno)
• A-1 Headline, a 2004 Hong Kong film
• Bus plunge, a type of news story, and accompanying headline
• Syntactic ambiguity, leads to multiple humorous possible alternative interpretations of written headlines

Further reading[link]

• Harold Evans News Headlines (Editing and Design : Book Three) Butterworth-Heinemann Ltd (February 1974) ISBN 0-434-90552-6 ISBN 978-0-434-90552-2
• Fritz Spiegl What The Papers Didn't Mean to Say Scouse Press, Liverpool, 1965

References[link]

1. ^ Wilford, John Noble (2009-07-14). "On Hand for Space History, as Superpowers Spar". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/science/space/14mission.html?pagewanted=all. Retrieved April 24, 2011. 
2. ^ Google Books search result
3. ^ The New York City Transit Authority in the 1980s
4. ^ "Telegraph wins newspaper vote". BBC News. 25 May 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/4973880.stm#hamster. 
5. ^ Great Satan sits down with the Axis of Evil
6. ^ "Super Caley dream realistic?". BBC. 22 March 2003. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/scot_div_1/2875957.stm. 
7. ^ Kinsley, Michael (1986-06-02). "Don't Stop The Press". The New Republic. http://www.tnr.com/article/83792/dont-stop-the-presses. Retrieved April 26, 2011. 
8. ^ Kinsley, Michael (2010-07-28). "Boring Article Contest". The Atlantic. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2010/07/boring-article-contest/17657/. Retrieved April 26, 2011. 

External links[link]

Look up headline in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Front Page - The British Library Exhibition of famous newspaper headlines (2006)

"The Blue Marble" photograph of Earth, taken from Apollo 17

The flag of the World Health Organization combines a modern world map (azimuthal equidistant projection) with the Rod of Asclepius, in origin a symbol of the axis mundi^[1]

World is a common name for the whole of human civilization, specifically human experience, history, or the human condition in general, worldwide, i.e. anywhere on Earth.^[2]

In a philosophical context it may refer to: (1) the whole of the physical Universe, or (2) an ontological world (see world disclosure). In a theological context, world usually refers to the material or the profane sphere, as opposed to the celestial, spiritual, transcendent or sacred. The "end of the world" refers to scenarios of the final end of human history, often in religious contexts.

World history is commonly understood as spanning the major geopolitical developments of about five millennia, from the first civilizations to the present.

World population is the sum of all human populations at any time; similarly, world economy is the sum of the economies of all societies (all countries), especially in the context of globalization. Terms like world championship, gross world product, world flags etc. also imply the sum or combination of all current-day sovereign states.

In terms such as world religion, world language, and world war, world suggests international or intercontinental scope without necessarily implying participation of the entire world.

In terms such as world map and world climate, world is used in the sense detached from human culture or civilization, referring to the planet Earth physically.

Etymology and usage[link]

The English word world comes from the Old English weorold (-uld), weorld, worold (-uld, -eld), a compound of wer "man" and eld "age," which thus means roughly "Age of Man."^[3] The Old English is a reflex of the Common Germanic *wira-alđiz, also reflected in Old Saxon werold, Old High German weralt, Old Frisian warld and Old Norse verǫld (whence the Icelandic veröld).^[4]

The corresponding word in Latin is mundus, literally "clean, elegant", itself a loan translation of Greek cosmos "orderly arrangement." While the Germanic word thus reflects a mythological notion of a "domain of Man" (compare Midgard), presumably as opposed to the divine sphere on the one hand and the chthonic sphere of the underworld on the other, the Greco-Latin term expresses a notion of creation as an act of establishing order out of chaos.

'World' distinguishes the entire planet or population from any particular country or region: world affairs pertain not just to one place but to the whole world, and world history is a field of history that examines events from a global (rather than a national or a regional) perspective. Earth, on the other hand, refers to the planet as a physical entity, and distinguishes it from other planets and physical objects.

'World' can also be used attributively, to mean 'global', 'relating to the whole world', forming usages such as world community or world canonical texts.^[5]

By extension, a 'world' may refer to any planet or heavenly body, especially when it is thought of as inhabited, especially in the context of science fiction or futurology.

'World', in original sense, when qualified, can also refer to a particular domain of human experience.

• The world of work describes paid work and the pursuit of career, in all its social aspects, to distinguish it from home life and academic study.
• The fashion world describes the environment of the designers, fashion houses and consumers that make up the fashion industry.
• historically, the New World vs. the Old World, referring to the parts of the world colonized in the wake of the age of discovery. Now mostly used in zoology and botany, as New World monkey.

Philosophy[link]

The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych by Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1503) shows the "garden" of mundane pleasures flanked by Paradise and Hell. The exterior panel shows the world before the appearance of humanity, depicted as a disc enclosed in a sphere.

In philosophy, the term world has several possible meanings. In some contexts, it refers to everything that makes up reality or the physical universe. In others, it can mean have a specific ontological sense (see world disclosure). While clarifying the concept of world has arguably always been among the basic tasks of Western philosophy, this theme appears to have been raised explicitly only at the start of the twentieth century^[6] and has been the subject of continuous debate. The question of what the world is has by no means been settled.

Parmenides

The traditional interpretation of Parmenides' work is that he argued that the every-day perception of reality of the physical world (as described in doxa) is mistaken, and that the reality of the world is 'One Being' (as described in aletheia): an unchanging, ungenerated, indestructible whole.

Plato

In his Allegory of the Cave, Plato distingues between forms and ideas and imagines two distinct worlds : the sensible world and the intelligible world.

Hegel

In Hegel's philosophy of history, the expression Weltgeschichte ist Weltgericht (World History is a tribunal that judges the World) is used to assert the view that History is what judges men, their actions and their opinions. Science is born from the desire to transform the World in relation to Man; its final end is technical application.

Schopenhauer

The World as Will and Representation is the central work of Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer saw the human will as our one window to the world behind the representation; the Kantian thing-in-itself. He believed, therefore, that we could gain knowledge about the thing-in-itself, something Kant said was impossible, since the rest of the relationship between representation and thing-in-itself could be understood by analogy to the relationship between human will and human body.

Wittgenstein

Two definitions that were both put forward in the 1920s, however, suggest the range of available opinion. "The world is everything that is the case," wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein in his influential Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in 1922. This definition would serve as the basis of logical positivism, with its assumption that there is exactly one world, consisting of the totality of facts, regardless of the interpretations that individual people may make of them.

Heidegger

Martin Heidegger, meanwhile, argued that "the surrounding world is different for each of us, and notwithstanding that we move about in a common world".^[7] The world, for Heidegger, was that into which we are always already "thrown" and with which we, as beings-in-the-world, must come to terms. His conception of "world disclosure" was most notably elaborated in his 1927 work Being and Time.

Freud

In response, Freud proposed that we do not move about in a common world, but a common thought process. He believed that all the actions of a person are motivated by one thing: lust. This led to numerous theories about reactionary consciousness.

Other

Some philosophers, often inspired by David Lewis, argue that metaphysical concepts such as possibility, probability and necessity are best analyzed by comparing the world to a range of possible worlds; a view commonly known as modal realism.

Religion and mythology[link]

It has been suggested that World (theology) be merged into this article or section. (Discuss) Proposed since July 2010.

Mythological cosmologies often depict the world as centered around an axis mundi and delimited by a boundary such as a world ocean, a world serpent or similar.

See also[link]

Environment portal

• Globe
• List of sovereign states
• Universe

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: World

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: World

• World entry at The World Factbook