3D Touch Apple’s term for pressure input on iPhone. On Apple Watch, it’s Force Touch. 3GS’s Plural of 3GS. Long-ago style was “3GSes” but see: https://daringfireball.net/2024/11/disambiguating_iphone_model_names_that_have_the_s_suffix 9to5Mac adapter adviser *Advisor* is an accepted spelling, but *adviser* is preferred, per both Garner and NYT. But: *advisory*. See Garner at *-er*. artificiality Seemingly preferred over *artificialness* despite *naturalness*, and my own ear. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/artificial https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/artificiality AirPort a la / à la Garner, 5th Ed: “This gallicism, meaning ‘in the manner or style of’, was borrowed into English in the late 1500s. [...] Generally, it is written without the DIACRITICAL MARK and without italics «he chipped in a la Tom Watson», unless it appears as part of a larger French phrase «steak *à la grecque*» «*pommes à la duchesse*».” That's contrary to NYT style, Merriam-Webster, and New Oxford American, which all specify the diacritical: à la. Previous DF style: With accent, not italicized. See . I skipped the diacritical but did italicize it here: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2023/11/07/final-cut-pro-new-features anti-alias antisemitism https://www.adl.org/spelling Seems like new NYT style, as well: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/21/opinion/texas-synagogue-antisemitism.html App Clip / app clip "App Clip when referring to the feature in marketing and titles. App clip (and app clip) when used in sentence case." AppKit The Cocoa Application Kit http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/Cocoa/AppKit.html Applebot https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829 Apple event lowercase ‘e’ AppleInsider Apple silicon archrival Cf. NYT Style Manual arrow keys Use lowercase in general references. Don’t use *direction keys*. Capitalize the name of each arrow key: Use the arrow keys to move the insertion point from cell to cell. Press the Left Arrow key. (From Apple Publications Style Guide.) auto-completion back door (n.) backdoor (adj.) back end (n.) back-end (adj.) backup (n.) back up (verb phrase) back-up (always wrong) backward bezel The area surrounding the display on the front face of a device. bitrate BlackBerry BlackBerrys. blond Per Garner: *blonde* is feminine, but “in AmE, *blond* is preferred in all senses.” Blu-ray lowercase ‘r’ Bluetooth BitTorrents: see “titles” Boot Camp Businessweek Used to be intercapped W, but Bloomberg has it lowercase now. cancelled, cancelling, cancellation Until February 2021, DF style followed Standard American English and used single L’s: canceled, canceling (and traveled, traveling). British English uses double L’s, which makes more natural sense. My mnemonic was always that Americans are cheap and wanted to save on the extra L’s. But The New Yorker style is double-L, which is good enough for me as prior art. capitalization of unusual names From the NYT style guide, p. 78, Company and Corporation Names: When a company name calls for unconventional capitalization, heed any preference that requires up to three capitals in a word. If the capitals exceed three, upper-and-lowercase the name except for proper nouns that appear within it. Thus: PepsiCo Inc., the BankAmerica Corporation, and the SmithKline Beecham Corporation. carveout (n.) carve out (v.) catercorner https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/catercorner cc, cc'd, cc'ing https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cc chrissake Chrome OS click wheel tappable scroll wheel on iPods CNet News They seem to want all-cap “CNET”, but forget about it. CNNMoney No space, no slash. As per: https://twitter.com/jack_regan/status/518032901884350465 Cocoa Touch colocation American Heritage says “collocation” but that seems outdated, if not just wrong. commas use a comma before “and”: this, that, and the other conspiratorial Garner labels conspirational, conspiratory, and conspirative as needless variants, and says ratio in print is a rather lopsided 264 : 2.4 : 1.9 : 1.w Core Data Cover Flow daylight saving time Mnemonic: there's only one "s" in "DST". decades Apostrophe only for the contraction: *the ’90s*. Prefer the full four-digit decade: the 1990s, the 2010s. dialog/dialogue *Dialog* for UI windows; *dialogue* for conversation. dimension sign Surround with spaces — 2 × 4 — per Bringhurst. ditto (v.) dittoed; dittoing; dittos douchebag downward not downwards; see note at *upward* DRM-free not “non-DRM” du jour French: “of the day”. *De jure* is Latin for “by law”. https://linguix.com/english/common-mistake/de_jure_du_jour Dynamic Island Views: compact leading, compact trailing, minimal, and expanded. e-book earbuds ellipses Bringhurst, 4.0, p. 82: i ... j k.... l..., l l,... l m...? n...! Thus, when used sort of like an em-dash to indicate a pause between words ... put spaces on both sides. email emojis (plural) NYT and New Yorker seem to agree. Esc/Escape Apple Style Guide: Include the word *Escape* in parentheses on first occurrence. First occurrence: *Press the Esc (Escape) key.* Thereafter: *Press Esc.* DF style: Just "Esc". Presume DF readers know it's "Escape". Ethernet FaceTime FairPlay file name not filename Financial Times They don't include "the" in the publication title. Fitts’s Law foreign words http://www.economist.com/research/styleGuide/index.cfm?page=805685 https://web.archive.org/web/20080210032900/http://www.economist.com/research/styleGuide/index.cfm?page=805685 In title case: “Raison d’Être” https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1994/10/28/660132.html?pageNumber=65 Per NYT Style Guide, which states (under “italics”) not to italicize foreign words unless they “are indisputably foreign -- either absent from the English dictionary or included but labeled foreign. [...] If in doubt, assume that a word is too familiar in English to be treated as foreign.” Formula 1 FreeHand Game Boy https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Hardware/Nintendo-History/Game-Boy/Game-Boy-627031.html gender *Gender* refers to a person’s identity, *sex* refers to biological characteristics. gewgaw /gyoo-gaw/ “a gaudy trinket or flashy bauble”. Garner: “has been predominately so spelled since the 1500s. The 20th-century variant *geegaw* hardly qualifies as even a lexicographic gewgaw.” Gmail Google Plus Greasemonkey not GreaseMonkey; cf. http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/ guerrilla http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=guerilla guillemets « and » H.264 http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/h264/ Hanukkah hark back Preferred over and more common than harken/hearken. See Garner 3rd Ed. Hold ’Em Home button Home Screen Apple Style Guide says *Home Screen*. Prior to 2022 DF style was lowercase *home screen*. See: «Lock Screen». Hong Kongers HyperCard, HyperTalk ID and IDs Never lowercase as synonym to “identity” or “identify”. input manager http://daringfireball.net/2006/01/smart_crash_reports internet https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/25/business/media/internet-to-be-lowercase-in-new-york-times-and-associated-press.html jacktastic JavaScript je ne sais quoi Italicize. jerry-built adj. of inferior workmanship and materials jibe Colloquially, it mean conform. In sailing, it means shift. *Gibe* means jeer or taunt. JPEG XL https://jpeg.org/jpegxl/ judgment In accordance with both NYT Style Guide *and* Amy’s preference for legal briefs. jury-rigged adj. done or made using whatever is available keychain lowercase keyboard shortcut Per Apple’s Style Guide, never *keyboard equivalent*. And just plain *shortcut* is now conflatable with Shortcuts macros. KnowledgeBase laissez-faire No italics. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/learning/word-quiz-laissez-faire.html laptop Prefer *notebook*. 2023-09-21: Rescind this? John le Carré Pronunciation: carr-ay. Le Carré at the beginning of a sentence but le Carré mid-sentence. lede https://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/18/magazine/on-language-hed-folo-my-lede-unhed.html Lego The company styles it “LEGO” but it’s not an acronym. lidar Unclear why Apple goes with "LiDAR" other than to make it seem exotic. lists, inline Use letters or numbers wrapped in parentheses: “(1) like this; (2) and this; and (3) like this.” loath/loathe Loathe (v.) means “to hate”. Loath (adj.) means “unwilling”. Lock Screen Capitalization per Apple Style Guide. Previous DF style was lowercase. See: «Home Screen». logomark/logotype https://www.inc.com/karen-tiber-leland/the-difference-between-a-logomark-a-logotype-which-is-right-for-your-company.html MacDevCenter O’Reilly’s Mac site: Note: Seems like they now use “Mac DevCenter”, too. MacGuffin See Roger Ebert: The Oxford English Dictionary specifies MacGuffin. Usage is divided; Google shows 1,920 hits for “MacGuffin & Hitchcock,” 1,150 for “McGuffin & Hitchcock.” In Hitchcock’s book-length interview with Francois Truffaut, it is spelled MacGuffin. That’s the winner. MacroMates magazines (and newspapers and websites, generally) Do not quote their names. If an article is the first word in the name of an English-language or foreign-language magazine, capitalize it: The New Yorker, L'Express, Le Point, Der Spiegel. Append the word *magazine*, lowercased, if it is needed for clarity or euphony: Time magazine, New York magazine. Quote the titles/headlines of articles and title-case them. Mobile Safari modus operandi No italics. New Yorker and NYT both agree. multi- (prefix) Close up in words beginning with either a consonant or a vowel (except i). multiplayer, multiprocessor, multitasking, multithreading, multiuser multi-item Apple Publications Guide multitouch Apple used multi-touch until 2012 (Multi-Touch, actually), but this deserves to be closed up. mustache not *moustache* neither Generally singular, but not always: https://archives.cjr.org/language_corner/either_wins.php The New York Times "NYT" as a nickname is OK. When referring to them as "the Times", lowercase the *the*, as per The New Yorker. NeXTStep http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/DifferentNeXTSpellings/DifferentNeXTSpellings.html NIB file cap. Old rule was lowercase, nib, but (a) that doesn’t work with XIBs, and it doesn’t match things like PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF. none Can be singular or plural; try substituting “not one” or “not any” to decide. See: https://www.merriam-webster.com/video/is-none-singular-or-plural notebook Preferred over *laptop*. nother used especially in the phrase *a whole nother* https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nother numbers spell out “one” through “nine”, use digits for 10 and higher. Judgment call on zero/0. See NYT for exceptions, such as ages, sums of money, etc. Nvidia Per NYT. OK, OK’s, OK’d, OK’ing Including as a verb. (DFW uses it as a verb in a Word Note in the New Oxford American Dictionary.) As Garner notes, the conjugated forms of *okay* (okayed, okaying, okays) are more natural but OK is the original. Perhaps we should reconsider and go with OKs, (OK'd contraction of OKed), OKing for verbs, and OK's for nouns? Noun form is so rare it's unlikely to come up. old-fashioned, old-fashioneds The cocktail. The Omni Group on-screen adj. and adv., according to New Oxford onstage Pac-Man pageview passcode Better than PIN. Also, “passcode” is used in Settings: Face ID & Passcode. paywall https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paywall PCMag per se No italics. See “foreign words”. Personal names Sebastiaan de With lowercases the “de”. De With gets capped at sentence start though. See NYT Manual of Style. phrasal adjectives Garner's American English: The Compound Conundrum: "When the first or last element in a phrasal adjective is part of a compound noun, it too needs to be hyphenated: *post-cold-war norms*, not *post-cold war norms*. Otherwise, as in that example, *cold* appears more closely related to *post* than to *war*." See also: https://bit.ly/eng-stackexchange-multiword-adjectives PlayBook RIM’s short-lived tablet. Playdate Panic’s handheld game system: PlayStation Mnemonic for the intercapped S: “PS4” and “PS5”, but no one calls the Playdate the “PD”. plugin Changed from *plug-in* on 17 Mar 2007, for the same reasons that apply to email vs. e-mail. See http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html plurals Proper names ending in *y* just add an *s*: O’Reilly → O’Reillys. Use apostrophes to pluralize letters and numbers, per the NYT: *he got A’s and B’s on his report card*; *mind your p’s and q’s*. iPhone 4 → iPhone 4’s (But: Apple Publications Style Guide pages 96, 135 & 174: "iPhone 4 devices. Best: rephrase.") “iPhone 4s” as a plural for “iPhone 4” is easily conflated with “iPhone 4S”, singular. yes’s and no’s (M-W and NOAD dictionaries both say *yeses* and *noes*, but there's some support here: https://www.margieholdscourt.com/making-yes-and-no-plural/, and I find those spellings ungainly.) In headlines, I've wavered between using apostrophes for plurals for acronyms and initialisms, a la the NYT, and not, for clarity with DF's all-caps style for headlines. ("Truckers Still Buy CB's"; "CBS Announces New Show".) As of July 2022, let's go back to just adding "s": https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/07/21/minecraft-bans-nfts plus/+ Apple News+, Apple TV+. This is different from something like “Yahoo!” because the “+” is pronounced. Surely the programming language is “C++”, not “C Plus Plus”. Also, “+” has no standard meaning as a punctuation mark in English — again, as opposed to “Yahoo!”. poring over https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/pore-over-vs-pour-over-poor-usage-difference PostScript PowerBook Power Mac preamp Short for preamplifier. Quick Look Quicksilver ray tracing readme I’m unsure about this one. Apple Style Guide goes with “Read Me”. Recode They use “Re/code”, but this abuses the traditional meaning of a slash in prose. E.g., “Walt Mossberg, of Re/code/WSJ fame.” Let “Re/code” go in blockquotes from Recode, though. résumé right-wing And, natch, “left-wing”, but that doesn’t seem to come up. rip-off (n.) rip off (v.) roundrect https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/roundrect https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt screenshot scroll bar The button you drag is the *scroller*; on Mac OS 9 it was the *scroll box*. See Apple Style Guide 2006 scroll wheel secondary-click (v.) Apple Style Guide endorses *Control-click*, I suspect because Control-clicking always works, no matter the input device. But *secondary-click* encompasses all ways to open a contextual menu: Control-clicking, two-finger-clicking, right-clicking, or even left-clicking for a user who’s customized their mouse buttons. seesaw In preference to *teeter-totter*. shitcan (v.) shitshow shit-fit sidenote https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sidenote signalled, signaller, signalling See *cancel*. Smart Connector Three-circle inductive connector on iPad accessories. smartphone souped-up https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/souped-up Soundbooth Adobe sound editor. spec, specced, speccing https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spec subexpression subpattern Named or numbered captured group in a regular expression pattern. No hyphens. “Subpattern” is from the PCRE docs; “subexpression” is Friedl’s term, although Friedl defines it as any component of a larger expression, not limited to captured groups. subpixel SuperMegaUltraGroovy Chris Liscio’s company. surnames, Dutch “Dutch names are kind of weird. When spelled out in full, like Wouter de Groot or Guido van Rossum, the middle bit is not capitalized. However, when using the last name only, it is. So, Van Rossum is joining Microsoft whereas De Groot is sending you a mildly pedantic email.” SwiftUI https://developer.apple.com/xcode/swiftui/ sync, syncs, synced, syncing Changed from sync/syncs/synchs/synching 31 Jul 2008. tallscreen A perfectly cromulent neologism, in contrast to *widescreen*. Tapback Apple: “A feature in the Messages app. Don’t use as a verb.” I wouldn’t hesitate to use it as a verb but I can’t think of a sentence where I’d want to. tentpole New Oxford American has it open as a noun — *tent pole* — and hyphenated as a modifier. But Merriam-Webster has it closed up in both forms: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tentpole Textpattern t-shirt Lowercase ‘t’ is contrary to NY Times Style Guide. Reason: if we go with T-shirt, wouldn’t we also need to go with E-mail (nothwithstanding DF’s style of “email”). [**Counterpoint**: The “T” in T-shirt is like the “A” in “A-frame house” -- it is the uppercase letterform specifically that represents the shape of the object.] TidBITS time OLD: a.m. and p.m., lowercase and with dots. NEW: am and pm, lowercase, no dots. *Meet me at 7:30 pm.* time stamp timezone titles books, movies, albums: quotes or *ems*? NYT and Economist say quotes I say: italicize Periodicals, such as newspapers, magazines, and web sites, don’t have titles, they have names. Just cap them — don’t use quotes or italics. Articles and songs: Quotes tmesis "the separation of parts of a compound word by an intervening word or words, heard mainly in informal speech (e.g., *a whole nother story*; *shove it back any-old-where in the pile*" Abso-fucking-lutely or abso*fucking*lutely? Play by ear? Touch Bar Touch ID touchscreen toward Not *towards*, which is British. https://fs.blog/2014/03/david-foster-wallace-common-word-usage-mistakes/ “Factoid: Except for *backwards* and *afterwards*, no preposition ending in *-ward* takes a final *s* in US English.” TrackBack: as per travelled, traveller, travelling See: *cancel*. Trojan horse TurboGears: Uighurs Per NYT, New Yorker, and WaPo. universal binary lowercase, see: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/universal_binary/ Still: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/xcode/building_a_universal_macos_binary ultra wide (camera) Apple Style Guide: ultra (prefix) — Close up except before a vowel. ultrafast, ultralight, ultrasharp, ultrathin, ultrawide ultra-efficient iPhone 15 reviewer guides use “Ultra Wide”, titlecased, however. EXIF metadata in Photos: “Ultra Wide Camera — 14 mm ƒ2.2” Unix upward not *upwards* (see note at ) URLs when used as literal text, italicize: The URL is *http://daringfireball.net/*. In general, prefer “URL” to “URI”, even when URI is arguably more technically accurate. Use “scheme” rather than “protocol” when talking about things like “message:” or “http:”. used to Garner: *used to*, not *use to*, is the phrase meaning "formerly". *Never used to* is better than *didn't used to*. v.; vs. Garner: Both are acceptable abbreviations of of *versus*, but they differ in application: *vs.* is more common except in names of law cases, in which *v.* /vee/ is the accepted abbreviation. voilà VMware web clip The custom web page bookmark icons on iPhone. Apple goes with “WebClip” which just seems wrong. webfont WebCore one word, open source rendering engine at heart of Web Kit See: WebDAV Webex Cisco dropped the inner-capped "WebEx" a while back. WebKit closed up, camel case cf. webmail WebOS Palm uses “webOS”. webpage If website is closed, so should be webpage. website one word, lowercase. (Switched from “web site” 23 Oct 2009.) TWM agrees: http://thatwhichmatter.tumblr.com/post/166241561/website-web-site-website-is-one-word-lowercase And now (April 2010) the AP: http://jimray.tumblr.com/post/526863310 whack-a-mole As per New Oxford American. But the coin-op game trademark is for "Whac-a-Mole", which, as I noted, looks wac-y. https://daringfireball.net/2021/04/et_tu_procter_gamble#fn1-2021-04-09 whether/if If you can use *whether*, always do so. *If* implies conditionality. *Whether or not* is redundant. http://htmlgiant.com/?p=20022 white paper Widget Bar singular, not “Widgets Bar” Wi-Fi: cf. WordPress Xbox XIB file XKCD “‘Xkcd’ is frowned upon.” http://xkcd.com/about/ Author: Randall Munroe Yahoo not “Yahoo!” Yippee Ki Yay http://flickr.com/photos/joeclark/808647721/ * * * References, roughly in order of priority: Garner’s Modern English Usage (5th Ed.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garner%27s_Modern_English_Usage https://global.oup.com/academic/product/garners-modern-english-usage-9780197599020?cc=us&lang=en& The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst (v. 4.0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Typographic_Style The Elements of Style, Strunk and White https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style The NYT Manual of Style and Usage https://www.amazon.com/dp/1101905441?tag=duckduckgo-osx-20&linkCode=osi&th=1&psc=1 The Economist Style Guide http://www.economist.com/research/StyleGuide/ (seemingly pulled some time in 2011) https://web.archive.org/web/20110430075824/http://www.economist.com/research/StyleGuide/ Merriam-Webster https://www.merriam-webster.com/ New Oxford American Dictionary (MacOS, iOS built-in dictionary) https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780195392883.001.0001/acref-9780195392883 Apple Style Guide https://support.apple.com/guide/applestyleguide/welcome/web https://books.apple.com/us/book/apple-style-guide/id1161855204 Apple Trademark List http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/appletmlist.html