A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
dachshund
Dad or dad?
capital D if it’s just Dad, eg “I’ll have to ask Dad”; otherwise lowercase, eg “my dad was a dustman, what does your dad do?” etc
dadaism, dadaist
Dáil Éireann
lower house of parliament in the Irish Republic, normally just the Dáil
DaimlerChrysler
Dakar
capital of Senegal; Dhaka capital of Bangladesh
dal
not dhal
Dalai Lama
no abbreviation: he is always the Dalai Lama
Dalek
takes initial cap, whether used literally (as in referring to Doctor Who), or figuratively (as in describing, say, your boss)
Dalí, Salvador
(1904-89) Spanish surrealist
dancefloor
one word (thanks to Arctic Monkeys for this one)
dangling participles
(also known as hanging participles)
Avoid constructions such as “having died, they buried him”; the pitfalls are nicely highlighted in Mark Lawson’s novel Going Out Live, in which a TV critic writes: “Dreary, repetitive and well past the sell-by date, I switched off the new series of Fleming Faces.”
Another example, from a leading article: “Due out in January as a white paper, Ms Kelly may be unable to overcome Mr Blair’s apparent determination to stick with A-levels.”
And this particularly exotic dangling participle somehow found its way into the paper: “Though long-legged and possessing a lovely smile, gentleman journalists aren’t looking up her skirt and wouldn’t even if she weren’t gay”
danish pastry
DA notices
issued by the Defence, Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee, “advising” that the media do not publish sensitive information; formerly D notices
Daraa
Syrian city, 90km from Damascus, not to be confused with Darayya, a suburb of Damascus, also sometimes described as a city
dark ages
darknet
dashcam
dashes
A single dash can add a touch of drama – like this. But use sparingly.
A pair of dashes are an alternative to commas or brackets for parenthesis when you want to draw the reader’s attention to something surprising or unusual. An example from the paper of how not to do it: “Many neighbours in the block – which sits close to the banks of the Thames – were visibly shaken.” The block’s innocuous location does not need underlining with dashes. Commas would suffice.
Beware sentences – such as this one – that dash about all over the place – commas (or even, very occasionally, brackets) are often better; semicolons also have their uses.
Dashes should be en dashes rather than em dashes or hyphens
data
takes a singular verb (like agenda), though strictly a plural; you come across datum, the singular of data, about as often as you hear about an agendum
datacentre, dataset
dates
Our style is: 21 July 2016 (day month year; no commas).
21 July-6 August, 6-10 August, etc.
In the 21st century but 21st-century boy; fourth century BC; AD2007, 2500BC, 10,000BC.
Use figures for decades: the 1960s, the swinging 60s, etc.
Should you have occasion to say 2016 out loud, for example in a podcast, pronounce it “twenty sixteen”, not “two thousand and sixteen”
daughter of, son of
Think twice before referring to people in these terms. Often only the person’s father is described and such descriptions can smack of snobbery as well as sexism.
Simplistic labels may also be misleading: we published a clarification after calling Captain James Cook the son of a Scottish farm labourer. True enough, but Cook’s mother was a Yorkshire woman and he is a famous son of Yorkshire
Davison, Emily
suffragette who died four days after stepping in front of George V’s horse at the 1913 Derby
daybreak, daydream
DayGlo
TM; but note the X-Ray Spex hit The Day the World Turned Day-Glo
Day Kundi
province in Afghanistan
daylong, daytime
but month-long, year-long, night-time
day trip
two words, eg Day Trip to Bangor by (trivia question) ... Fiddler’s Dram
D-day
6 June 1944, or used figuratively (“Monday is D-day for the Blades’ promotion hopes”)
deaf ears
Avoid or say “closed ears”; the phrase is not just a rather lazy cliche but offensive to many deaf people. For the same reason, do not use “dialogue of the deaf”: most deaf people are perfectly capable of conducting a dialogue using BSL and other sign languages. The term “deaf mute” is also outdated and offensive; “deaf”, where relevant, will suffice.
Note that a hearing aid is not a “deaf aid” (although we contrived to use the phrase in a crossword in August 2012)
deathbed
but death row
debacle
no accents; like farce and fiasco, to be used sparingly in news reporting
debatable
decades
1950s, etc; use figures if you abbreviate: roaring 20s, swinging 60s, a woman in her 70s, the first reader’s email of the 00s (pronounced, unfortunately, “noughties”)
deceptively
ambiguous (in one survey, half the respondents thought “deceptively easy” meant easy, and half thought it meant hard), and therefore best avoided – advice unlikely to be heeded, sadly, by estate agents
decimate
nowadays used to mean destroy (yes, we know it originally meant to kill one in 10)
See Latin
declarations
lc, eg Laeken declaration on the future of Europe
decorations
no need normally to put OBE, KCMG, etc after people’s names
decry
condemn; descry discover
You only ever see descry when someone uses it wrongly to mean decry
deep south
of the US
defensible
definite, definitely, definitive, definitively
”For me, this is definitely the definitive style guide”
defriend
or unfriend (Facebook)
defuse
render harmless; diffuse spread about
Degas, Edgar
(1834-1917) French artist
de Gaulle, Charles
(1890-1970) French military leader and statesman; De Gaulle on second mention
degrees
like this: my sons all got firsts, but I only got a second – although it was a 2:1 – and I did go on to a master’s
deja vu
defined as the phenomenon of having the strong sensation that an event or experience currently being experienced has already been experienced in the past (whether it has actually happened or not). So watching England underperforming and being knocked out of a major football tournament at an early stage, for example, might be said to induce a sense of deja vu
Delevingne, Cara
Delhi
unless specifically referring to the small area of the city that is New Delhi
delivery
the arrival of a baby, letter or parcel; also widely found in such gruesome examples of marketing-speak as “delivering care” or “delivering quality and value”
Deloitte
not Deloittes, Deloitte Consulting, or Deloitte & Touche
delphic
deltas
are, like other geographical features, lc: Nile delta, Okavango delta, etc
delusion or illusion?
“That the sun moves round the Earth was once a delusion, and is still an illusion” (Fowler)
dementia
not “senile dementia”.
We should take care to refer to a person or people with dementia, or living with dementia, not as a “dementia sufferer” or “victims of dementia”.
Dementia is an umbrella term that refers to various conditions. Some of the more common types of dementia include Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, Lewy Body dementia, and fronto-temporal dementia (eg Pick’s disease). Respect people’s choices about how they identify themselves, for example as someone with Alzheimer’s disease rather than dementia
DeMille, Cecil B
(1881-1959) Hollywood producer and director; the B stood for Blount
Democrat, Democratic
In American politics, Democrat is a noun, Democratic an adjective: Hillary Clinton is a Democrat, and a member of the Democratic party.
The distinction is important because the Republicans use “Democrat” as an adjective, eg “Democrat party”, in a pejorative way
the Democratic Republic of the Congo
DRC on second mention; not to be confused with its smaller neighbour Congo-Brazzaville (which is also known as the Republic of the Congo); both countries border the Congo river. DRC, formerly the colony of Belgian Congo and then Zaire, is the second largest country in Africa by area and the fourth most populated
Dench, Dame Judi
not Judy
Deng Xiaoping
denier
one who denies, as in “Holocaust denier”; there is no such word as “denialist”.
The OED defines a sceptic as “a seeker of the truth; an inquirer who has not yet arrived at definite conclusions”, which is highly flattering to “climate change sceptics” who are literally in denial about the overwhelming scientific evidence and deny that climate change is happening or is caused by human activity, so denier is the more accurate, and our preferred, term.
denier is also a unit of weight for fibre, eg 10-denier tights
De Niro, Robert
denouement
no accent
departments of state
British government ministries (but not ministers) take initial caps, as follows:
Cabinet Office (but the cabinet)
Home Office
Foreign Office (abbreviate to FCO – for Foreign and Commonwealth Office – after first mention)
Treasury
Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS, formerly the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and incorporating the Department of Energy and Climate Change)
Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG)
Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS)
Department for Education (DfE)
Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)
Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU)
Department for International Development (DfID)
Department for International Trade (DIT)
Department for Transport (DfT)
Department for Work and Pensions (DWP)
Department of Health (DH)
Ministry of Defence (MoD)
Ministry of Justice (MoJ)
Office of the Leader of the House of Commons
Northern Ireland Office
Scotland Office not Scottish Office
Wales Office not Welsh Office
Use the abbreviations in brackets sparingly, especially the clumsy ones: business department, culture and sport department, and so on are fine, or just the department, the ministry, etc.
Departments and ministries of other English-speaking countries also take an initial capital, eg US Department of State, Indian Ministry of Railways.
Departments and ministries of non-English-speaking countries are lc, eg French ministry of the interior, Iraqi foreign ministry
dependant
noun; dependent adjective; dependence
His dependants were dependent on him for everything
depositary
person; depository place
deprecate
express disapproval; depreciate reduce in value.
Hence self-deprecating humour or remark, not “self-depreciating”
derby
as in Everton v Liverpool or Newbury FC v Thatcham Town; it is not normally necessary to include the word “local”
de rigueur
the two Us are de rigueur
derisive or derisory?
The former means contemptuous, as in a yell of derision; the latter means unworthy of serious discussion, as in a derisory offer
derring-do
not daring-do
Derry, Co Derry
(County Derry at first mention) not Londonderry, Co Londonderry
descendants
come after ancestors; you wouldn’t think we would get this simple thing wrong as often as we do
deselect
desiccated
not dessicated
despoil
but despoliation
dessert
pudding, but just deserts
Dettol
TM
developing countries
rather than third world
devil, the
de Villepin, Dominique
Villepin on second mention
DeVito, Danny
diabetes
a lifelong condition that causes a person’s blood sugar (glucose) level to become too high. The hormone insulin, produced by the pancreas, is responsible for controlling the amount of glucose in the blood.
There are two types of diabetes, type 1 and type 2, and it is important to distinguish between the two.
Type 1 diabetes, where the pancreas does not produce any insulin, comprises about 10% of cases but is the most common type of childhood diabetes. Type 1 is an auto-immune disease, cause unknown (although genetics is believed to play a part). Weight is not a factor
Type 2 diabetes, where the pancreas does not produce enough insulin or the body’s cells don’t react to insulin, comprises about 90% of adult cases. Obesity, lack of exercise and an unhealthy diet have contributed to an increase in the number of adults developing type 2 diabetes
Diabetes UK
formerly known as the British Diabetic Association
Diaghilev, Sergei
(1872-1929) Russian impresario; founder of the Ballets Russes
dialects
cockney, estuary English, geordie, scouse
diamond jubilee
diaspora
DiCaprio, Leonardo
Dictaphone
TM
die
is what people do in the Guardian (not “passed away”, “shuffled off this mortal coil” or any other euphemism)
diehard
although the film series is Die Hard
dietitian
must be trained and qualified in dietetics, and registered with the Health Professionals Council; not the same as a nutritionist, a less precise term (although some nutritionists are also registered dietitians)
different from
is traditionally the correct form; different to is widely accepted nowadays, but note the difference between:
She looked very different to those who came before (to the people who came before, she looked very different).
She looked very different from those who came before (she did not look like the people who came before).
Different than is frowned on, at least in British English; and it’s always differs from, not differs to
digital rights management
can be abbreviated to DRM after first mention
digitalise
administer digitoxin (extracted from foxglove leaves) to treat heart conditions; digitise transcribe data into digital format
dignitary, dignitaries
dijon mustard
dilapidated
dilemma
Not just a posh word for decision. It suggests a choice between two difficult choices of action. Perhaps the best known dilemma is “to be or not to be”
dilettante
dim sum
Dinky Toys
TM
dinner ladies
are generally known as school meals supervisors these days
diphtheria
diplomatic service
director general
direct speech
People we write about are allowed to speak in their own, not necessarily our, style, but be sensitive: do not, for example, expose someone to ridicule for dialect or grammatical errors.
Do not attempt facetious phonetic renditions such as “oop north”, “fooking” and “booger” when interviewing someone from the north, or “dahn sarf” when writing about south London
dire straits
not straights
disabled people
not “the disabled”
We aim to use positive language about disability, avoiding outdated terms that stereotype or stigmatise.
Terms to avoid, with acceptable alternatives in brackets, include victim of, suffering from, afflicted by, crippled by (prefer person who has, person with); wheelchair-bound, in a wheelchair (uses a wheelchair); invalid (disabled person); mentally handicapped, backward, retarded, slow (person with learning difficulties or disabilities); the disabled, the handicapped, the blind, the deaf (disabled people, blind people, deaf people); deaf and dumb (deaf and speech-impaired, hearing and speech-impaired)
disassemble
take apart; dissemble conceal
disburse
give out money; disperse scatter a crowd
disc
rotating optical disc: CD, CD-Rom, DVD, etc; disk rotating magnetic disc: disk drive, floppy disk
discernible
not discernable
discharged
a patient is discharged, not released, from hospital; a prisoner is released from jail
discolour
but discoloration
discomfit
(verb) to make uncomfortable or uneasy (its older meaning, to thwart or frustrate, has largely fallen into disuse); discomfort (noun) inconvenience, distress or mild pain
discreet
circumspect; discrete separate
disfranchise
not disenfranchise
disfigured, disfigurement
rather than deformed, deformity
disinterested
means free from bias, objective (the negative form of interested as in “interested party”); often used incorrectly instead of uninterested, not taking an interest (the negative form of interested as in “interested in football”). So disinterest is impartiality, not a lack of interest.
The distinction is one we should strive to maintain because it is not helpful to readers if we use disinterested and uninterested to mean the same thing
Disneyland
(California)
Disneyland Paris
(formerly Euro Disney)
Disney World
(Florida)
disoriented
not disorientated
dispatch, dispatch box
(Commons), dispatched; not despatch, despatched
Disprin
TM; call it aspirin
dissociate, dissociation
not disassociate, disassociation
distinct or distinctive?
There’s a distinct possibility that he will insist on showing you the distinctive birthmark on his left buttock
distributor
not distributer
ditching
not a synonym for crashing: if you ditch a helicopter, you make a controlled landing on the water after an emergency – we have got this wrong several times
divorcee
a divorced person, male or female
divvy up, divvying up
The BBC used the grotesque “divi’ing up”
D notices
see DA notices
Doctor Who
the title of the series – do not abbreviate to Dr Who; the character’s name is the Doctor, and he is a Time Lord
docudrama, docusoap
dogs
normally lc, eg alsatian, doberman, jack russell, labrador, rottweiler, yorkshire terrier; but note German shepherd, Irish setter, old English sheepdog
D’oh!
as Homer Simpson would say (note the apostrophe)
Dolby
TM
Dolittle, Dr
character who talked to the animals, created by Hugh Lofting; Doolittle, Eliza character created by George Bernard Shaw in Pygmalion; also a British singer-songwriter (born 1988)
doll’s house
dome, the
Millennium Dome at first mention, thereafter the dome; now the O2
Domesday Book
but doomsday scenario
domestic violence/family violence
Both terms are acceptable, but a mention of domestic violence at some point is helpful for clarity. (It is also preferred by some advocacy groups.) Always include helpline numbers
domestic violence victims/survivors
The term victim is used for those in a violent situation or at risk of violence. The term survivor is used for people who have experienced domestic violence in the past. Give priority to the preferences of the person we are writing about
Dominica
former British colony in the Windward Islands, south-east of Dominican Republic
Dominican Republic
independent Spanish-speaking country that shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti
doner
kebab
donor
gives money
doppelganger
no accent
dos and don’ts
Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich
(1821-81) Russian novelist, author of Crime and Punishment and The Idiot
dotcom
Double, the
as in Chelsea won the Double in 2010 (FA Cup and Premier League)
doubledecker
bus; Double Decker chocolate bar
doughnuts
despite Dunkin’ Donuts
dove
a bird, not the past tense of dive, which is dived
dover sole
Dow Jones industrial average
downmarket
downplay
play down is preferable
downriver, downstream
Down’s syndrome
say (if relevant) a baby with Down’s syndrome, not “a Down’s syndrome baby” – we wouldn’t say “a cerebral palsy baby”. The diagnosis is not the person
downtown
down under
a term Australians themselves rarely use, and best avoided
doyen, doyenne
the senior member of a group, eg “she was the doyenne of ballet critics.” It once meant a leader or commander of 10 men
dozen
precisely, not approximately, 12
Dr
at first mention for medical and scientific doctors and doctors of divinity (not, for example, a politician who happens to have a PhD in history); thereafter, just use surname except in leading articles
draconian
draft
document; draught current of air
draftsman, draftswoman
of documents; draughtsman, draughtswoman of drawings
dreamed
not dreamt
DreamWorks
dressing room
two words
drier, dryer
this shirt will only get drier after an hour in the tumble dryer (while I use the hairdryer)
drily
not dryly
drink
past tense drank, past participle drunk: he drinks too much – last night he drank 10 pints, the least he has drunk on any night this week
drink-driver, drink-driving, drunk-driving
The limits are breath: 35 micrograms per 100 millilitres; blood: 80 milligrams per 100 millilitres; urine: 107 milligrams per 100 millilitres.
If a breath test is positive, but less than 50 micrograms per 100 millilitres, then a blood or urine test is needed before a prosecution can be brought; above 50, a breath test alone is strong enough to be used as evidence
driving licence
not driver’s licence in British English
drone
honeybee whose function is to mate with the queen, and by extension therefore someone who lives off the work of others (the worker bees); however, it seems to be used increasingly to mean something like an obedient, unimaginative worker (“office drone”)
drug companies, drug dealer, drug raid, drug squad, drug tsar
not drugs raid, etc
drug use
a more accurate and less judgmental term than “drug abuse” or “misuse” (often all three terms have been scattered randomly through the same reports)
druid
drum’n’bass
drunkenness
DSG International
the former Dixons; owns Currys and PC World. DSG stands for Dixons Store Group, but in June 2010 the company, belatedly realising that no one in the world was aware of this, decided to change back to Dixons
dub
Avoid such tabloidese as “he has been dubbed the nation’s leading expert on style” (even if true)
duct tape
not duck tape
due to or owing to?
Traditionalists argue that “due to” should only be used when it is the complement of the verb “to be”, and could be replaced by “caused by”; otherwise, use “owing to” or “because of”:
The train’s late arrival was due to [caused by] leaves on the line; the train was late owing to [because of] leaves on the line.
The distinction, once routinely taught in primary schools but now assailed on all sides, especially by train and tube announcers, is being lost.
There is no such controversy about “due to” in other contexts – rent is due to the landlord, we are due to arrive in 10 minutes, etc
duffel bag, duffel coat
The fabric was named after Duffel, a town in Belgium
dugout
Duke and Duchess of Cambridge
(or wherever), first mention; thereafter the duke and duchess.
Variations on “Prince William and Kate” or “Kate and William” are fine for headlines. “Princess Kate” is wrong
Duke of York
first mention; thereafter Prince Andrew or the prince
dumb
do not use when you mean speech-impaired
du Pré, Jacqueline
(1945-87) English cellist, Du Pré at second mention
Dupré, Marcel
(1886-1971) French organist and composer
Dürer, Albrecht
(1471-1528) German painter
dutch auction, dutch courage, dutch treat
but double Dutch
DVD
stands for digital versatile disc
dwarves
plural of dwarf (not dwarfs); but the verb is to dwarf, eg the Shard dwarfs the surrounding buildings
dyke
not dike
dynamo
plural dynamos
Dynamo
football teams from the former Soviet Union are Dynamo; teams from Romania are Dinamo
dyslexia
write “Paul has dyslexia” rather than labelling him “a dyslexic” or saying he “suffers from” dyslexia
