How to Decide If You Should Italicize Foreign Words and Phrases

8 June, 2020

It’s easy to press the italics button in Microsoft Word, but have you ever wondered if you’re using italics correctly?

One of the common uses of italic type is for words and phrases that are in a foreign language. You might have noticed that documents in English use italics if, for example, any French, German or Latin words appear. However, the use of italics for foreign words and phrases varies. Not every word or phrase that has its origins in other languages is italicized. And if italic is used in some instances in a document, that word or phrase might not be italicized on every occasion in the same publication, and it might not be italicized at all in other publications. 

So what’s the basis for deciding when – and when not – to italicize a foreign word?

Automate How You Check for Italicization Right From Microsoft Word

There are tools that can monitor your consistency of italicization and much more right from MS Word. PerfectIt, for example, does this right from Word and has a 14-day free trial.

How Style Guides Help to Decide If You Should Use Italics

Many publishers, government departments, newspapers, companies and other organizations have style guides for their employees and marketing teams to follow. Those style guides offer advice about the preferred style of writing as well as finer details such as which style to use for headings and how to set out quotations.

Some style guides include general advice about italicizing foreign words and phrases, for example, to use italics only for the less common foreign words. Other guides are more specific and state precisely which words and phrases to italicize (or which dictionary to follow for guidance).

Below is a table showing a sample of foreign words and phrases and whether they are italicized in three different styles. The letter 'Y' shows that the preferred style is to italicize the words; the letter 'X' means the style is to use roman rather than italic type. If a cell is blank, the source doesn’t mention whether to italicize the word or phrase, so you can use your discretion.

	Australian Government Style	Hart's Rules	Oxford Dictionaries Online
a priori	X	X	Y
bête noire	X	Y	Y
coup de grace	X		Y
de rigueur	X	Y	Y
E. coli	Y		X
ex-ante	X		X
faux pas	X		Y
fin de siècle	X		Y
in situ	X	Y	Y
inter alia	X	Y	Y
laissez-faire	X	Y	Y
mot juste	X		Y
nom de guerre	X		Y
non sequitur	X		Y
nouveau riche	X	Y	Y
objet d'art	X	Y	Y
pièce de résistance	X	Y	X
pied-à-terre	X	Y	Y
schadenfreude	X		X
Zeitgeist	X	Y	Y

Other Ways to Use Italics

Italics are not just for foreign words and phrases. For instance, it’s customary to italicize the following (this isn’t an exhaustive list):

• book titles, film titles and TV programme names
• ­play titles, and stage directions in plays
• ­titles of operas, overtures and ballets
• ­works of art
• ­journals, magazines, periodicals and newspapers
• ship and aircraft names
• ­theorems in mathematical works
• ­names of the parties in legal cases.

You can also use italics for:

• ­drawing attention to a word or to emphasize an idea
• ­styling headings or subheadings
• ­setting quoted material, footnotes and cross-references apart from the main text
• ­introducing a new or special word or phrase, or defining it for the first time.

Consistency Matters

As you can see from the examples above, the use of italics can vary widely. Whichever style you decide to follow, the most important thing is to be consistent.

Consistency matters because it helps the people who are going to read your work. If you don’t use italics consistently, your text can become confusing, messy and off-putting. Moreover, enforcing your company’s style consistently in each document and across all your written material, reinforces your brand. A thoroughly polished project proposal, rather than an untidy one, can impress your client. Legal documents with inconsistencies, such as incorrectly formatted case details, may lose business or compromise matters in legal proceedings.

Save Time When You Check for Consistency

Writing a long proposal, article, contract, dissertation or other document is tough enough. It’s natural to try to minimize the time you spend on the finer points of style in order to focus on the substance of your document. But that has consequences for consistency. So think about how much better your document could be with a fast way to check consistency.

With PerfectIt installed on your PC, checking takes just seconds. Once you’ve finished the main job of writing, PerfectIt will run more than 30 tests on your document, including a test for consistency of italics. It will point out where a foreign phrase appears both with and without italics in your document. And it will guide you to each potential error, and allow you to fix them with a single click.

You can add words/phrases to PerfectIt’s checking so that it will look for other uses of italics, too, such as book titles and names of vehicles. In each case, you can decide whether the phrase should be always italicized, never italicized or italicized at the first instance only. PerfectIt will enforce your preference every time that you run it, so you can be sure that documents reflect the style guide you’re working with.

Conclusion

When you’re thinking about how to format foreign words, remember these key points:

• ­it’s a question of style
• ­find out if your organization or client has a preferred style, and follow it
• ­apply your decision consistently.

And if you’re writing or editing regularly, remember that you can save time and ensure consistency by using PerfectIt. PerfectIt is free for 14 days, so click to download the free trial now.