If the cap fits: why Nato but not Bbc?

Barely a week goes by without at least one BBC News website reader asking why acronyms are in lower case: ‘it should be NASA, not Nasa.’

It was a topic of discussion among commenters on my blog last month announcing the public launch of the BBC News style guide.

As with all style books the overriding aim is to be consistent. Simple rules are the best way to do that.

So in this case our principle is thatacronyms will generally be in upper and lower case.

So we have Nasa, Nato, Unesco, Aids, Fifa, Farc.

There was also a concern, certainly in the earlier days of the BBC News website when the text was much narrower, that too many capitals could create a cluttered look: knocking them down was easier on the eye.

Of course, as with any rule, there are exceptions.

We've toyed with Ukip and I've seen UKip, but because the UK would always be capped we feel UKIP should follow suit.

In other cases acronyms are capped because using lower case might confuse readers. So it’s NICE and SAD rather than Nice and Sad.

Readers often end their queries with: ‘if it's Nasa, why isn't it Bbc?’

Here we come to the key point about acronyms: they can be pronounced as words. If the letters in abbreviations are pronounced separately - an ‘initialism’ - they stay capped.

Funnily enough, the example given in the OED is BBC (now there's a place that knows all about initialisms!) Others include RAF, CBI, CIA, UNHCR and NASUWT. It’s worth noting that the BBC’s view on acronyms is widely shared among UK media.

But there's another aspect to this, which is whether publishers should respect the right of a company or organisation to call itself what it wants. Nasa itself always uses caps, which is probably why it's often the subject of comments and complaints on this issue.

Other names present more complex considerations: QinetiQ, easyJet, iPhone, Yahoo!, BlackBerry. We treat company names as though their punctuation were conventional, but again there are exceptions. The ‘i’ in iPhone and iPod and the ‘e’ in eBay remain lower case except at the start of a sentence, when they become capped. We retain the middle cap in YouTube and MySpace because we think it prevents readers being confused by a word they are used to seeing in a particular way.

Unusual spellings are becoming more common, particularly among tech companies, and how we render them is an issue that often crops up. We're becoming more relaxed about it and exceptions do get made for ease of understanding.

But one of the cast-iron rules of style is that if you’re constantly making exceptions it's probably time for a new rule.

You can access the whole BBC News style guide here.