The Chicago Manual of Style ( CMOS) is a style guide for American English published since 1906 by the University of Chicago Press. Its 18 editions (the most recent in 2024) have prescribed writing and citation styles widely used in publishing.
The guide specifically focuses on American English and deals with aspects of editorial practice, including grammar and usage, as well as document preparation and formatting.
Availability and uses
Many publishers throughout the world adopt "Chicago" as their style. It is used in some social science publications, most North American historical journals and remains the basis for the Style Guide of the American Anthropological Association, the Style Sheet for the Organization of American Historians, and corporate style guides, including the Apple Style Guide.
The Chicago Manual of Style includes chapters relevant to publishers of books and journals. It is used widely by academic and some trade publishers, as well as editors and authors who are required by those publishers to follow it. Kate L. Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations is a student-friendly presentation of Chicago style.
Citation styles
Author-date style
When page numbers are used, they are placed along with the author's last name and date of publication an interposed comma.
If the author's name is used in the text, only the date of publication need be cited parenthetically (with or without the page number).
In-text citations are usually placed just inside a mark of punctuation. An exception to this rule is for , where the citation is placed outside the punctuation.
The full citation for the source is then included in a references section at the end of the material. As publication dates are prominent in this style, the reference entry places the publication date following the author(s) name.
Notes and bibliography style
The following is an example of a journal article citation provided as a note and its bibliography entry.
In order of appearance, the elements of a bibliography entry are:
- The author(s), with the first author's name inverted in the bibliography entry (in this case "Heilman, James M., and Andrew G. West");
- The article title inside quotation marks (in this case '"Wikipedia and Medicine: Quantifying Readership, Editors, and the Significance of Natural Language."');
- The journal title in italics (in this case " Journal of Medical Internet Research);
- The volume (in this case "17");
- The issue preceded by "no." (in this case "no. 3");
- The year and, if specified, month, inside parentheses (in this case "(2015)");
- The page numbers, with notes listing the current reference's specific page number and bibliography entries listing the overall page range (in this case "e62" since the example was published electronically without page numbers); and
- The digital object identifier (in this case "doi:10.2196/jmir.4069").
History
The most significant revision to the manual was made for the 12th edition, published in 1969. Its first printing of 20,000 copies sold out before it was printed. In 1982, with the publication of the 13th edition, it was officially retitled The Chicago Manual of Style, adopting the informal name already in widespread use.
More recently, the publishers have released a new edition about every seven to ten years. The 15th edition (2003) was revised to reflect the emergence of computer technology and the internet in publishing, offering guidance for citing electronic works. Other changes include a chapter on American English grammar and use, and a revised treatment of mathematical copy.
In August 2010, the 16th edition was published simultaneously in the hardcover and online editions for the first time in the manual's history. In a departure from the earlier red-orange cover, the 16th edition features a robin's-egg blue dust jacket (a nod to older editions with blue jackets, such as the 11th and 12th). It also expanded recommendations for producing electronic publications, including web-based content and . An updated appendix on production and digital technology demystified the process of electronic workflow and offered a primer on the use of XML markup. It also includes a revised glossary, including a host of terms associated with electronic and print publishing. The Chicago system of documentation is streamlined to achieve greater consistency between the author-date and notes-bibliography systems of citation, making both systems easier to use. In addition, updated and expanded examples address the many questions that arise when documenting online and digital sources, from the use of DOIs to citing social networking sites. Figures and tables are updated throughout the book, including a return to manual's popular hyphenation table and new, selective listings of Unicode numbers for special characters.
In 2013, an adapted Spanish version was published by the University of Deusto in Bilbao, Spain.
In April 2016, the publisher released The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation, Bryan A. Garner's expansion of his Chicago Manual of Style chapter on the topic, and coinciding with the release of the new edition of Garner's Modern American Usage.
The 17th edition was published in September 2017. It offers new and expanded style guidelines in response to advancing technology and social change. It also includes new and revised content reflecting the latest publishing practices and electronic workflows and self-publishing. Citation recommendations, the glossary of problematic words and phrases, and the bibliography have all been updated and expanded. In the 17th edition, email lost its hyphen, internet became lowercase, the singular "they" and "their" are now acceptable in certain circumstances, a major new section on syntax has been added, and the long-standing recommendation to use "ibid" has changed due to electronic publishing.
The 18th edition, published in September 2024, was the first to recommend omitting publication locations from citations. It added citation styles for A.I. generated text and images, increased the scope of usage of singular and non-binary "they," and abandoned its efforts (since 1969) of writing "Roman" in "Roman numerals" in lowercase. It removed the chapter on mathematics in type (citing low usage) but increased its coverage of citations of Indigenous languages (now with capital "I") and of Korean.
Recent printed editions
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(2026). 9780226287058, University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226287058
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(2026). 9780226817972, University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226817972
See also
- A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations
- Hart's Rules
- Linguistic prescription
- MHRA Style Guide
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