Style guide

Libyan leader rather than president (he holds no government office and is generally known in Libya as "leader of the revolution"); Gaddafi on second mention

hook or spar, also slang for house; blow the gaff give away a secret

blunder

Oasis brothers (Noel and Liam)

cigarette company

not Gambia

an opening strategy that involves some sacrifice or concession; so to talk of an opening gambit is tautologous - an opening ploy might be better

not Ghandi

(1898-1936) Spanish writer

Colombian novelist

Irish police force; garda (plural gardaí) police officer

not garrotte or garrote

up-and-under (rugby union)

Irish rugby club

plural of gas, but the verb is gasses

general agreement on tariffs and trade

(1852-1926) Catalan architect

(1848-1903) French painter

Use as an adjective rather than a noun: a gay man, gay people, gay men and lesbians not "gays and lesbians"

gigabits; GB gigabytes

A* not A-star

Our use of language reflects our values, as well changes in society. Phrases such as career girl or career woman, for example, are outdated (more women have careers than men) and patronising (there is no male equivalent): never use them.

actor, comedian: covers men and women; not actress, comedienne (but waiter and waitress are acceptable – at least for the moment).

firefighter, not fireman; PC, not WPC (police forces have abandoned the distinction), postal workers, not postmen.

Avoid terms such as businessmen, housewives, male nurse, woman pilot, woman (lady!) doctor, etc, which reinforce outdated stereotypes. If you need to use an adjective, it is female and not "woman" in such phrases as female MPs, female president.

Do not gratuitously describe a woman as 'mother-of-three': family details and marital status are only relevant in stories about families or marriage.

Use humankind or humanity rather than mankind, a word that, as one of our readers points out, "alienates half the population from their own history".

Never say "his" to cover men and women: use his or her, or a different construction; in sentences such as "a teacher who beats his/her pupils is not fit to do the job", there is usually a way round the problem – in this case, "teachers who beat their pupils ... "

Men who occasionally question our robust policy and accuse us of "political correctness" may care to reflect on the fact that Fowler's used to list such "established feminine titles" as adventuress, authoress, doctress, editress, inspectress, executrix, giantess, huntress, Jewess, poetess, procuress, quakeress, songstress, tailoress, wardress; it also recommended using new ones such as danceress and teacheress, pointing out that "with the coming extension of women's vocations, feminines for vocation-words are a special need of the future; everyone knows the inconvenience of being uncertain whether a doctor is a man or a woman ... "

General Tommy Franks at first mention, then Franks

(GMC), doctors' disciplinary body

(1926)

(not convention); four treaties, last revised and ratified in 1949, which with three more recently adopted protocols set out international standards for the humanitarian treatment of prisoners of war and civilians caught up in war

Distinct areas are capped up: Black Country, East Anglia, Lake District, Midlands, Peak District, West Country; but areas defined by compass points are lc: the north, the south-east, the south-west, etc

noun and adjective; refers to people from Tyneside, and their accent

plural ghettoes

George Bernard Shaw's proposed spelling of the word "fish" (gh as in trough, o as in women, ti as in nation)

We know that BP and Vodafone are big companies, so don't need to be told that they are "the telecoms giant" or "the oil giant"

no hyphen

overseas territory or dependency, not a British colony; its inhabitants are Gibraltarians

not a verb (unless, perhaps, directly quoting a football manager or player: "We gifted Spurs their second goal")

female under 18

noun (only when quoting someone); girly adjective (eg girly clothes);

behaviour

Post Office; gyro navigation aid

former French president, Giscard on second mention

or Rudy (not Rudi) former New York mayor

regularly misspelt as Guiseppe; this is sloppy

A mistake we repeat ad nauseam is the assumption that GLA stands for "Greater London assembly". There is no such thing. The Greater London authority comprises the mayor, who runs it, and the London assembly, which holds the mayor to account

not glamourous

a head-butt

GSK on second mention and in headlines

no need to write genetically modified in full at first mention

Greenwich mean time: the ship ran aground at 8am local time (0700 GMT)

meaningless nonsense when employed as an alternative to "in the future"

no apostrophe

for holes, use numbers: 1st, 2nd, 18th, etc; matchplay: one word, except World Match Play Championship; the Open, not the British Open

cap up, even when used as a verb ("I Googled myself"); named after googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros or 10100

noun; go slow verb

(uc) Germanic tribe that invaded the Roman empire

(lc) Sisters of Mercy fans who invaded the Shepherd's Bush Empire

lc in all contexts and all countries; resist the awful trend to say such things as "Lord Browne fended off accusations of being too close to government" – it should be the government

see departments of state

are plural; graffito is the singular

the set of rules followed by speakers of a language, rather than a set of arbitrary dos and don'ts, or as Ambrose Bierce put it, "a system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet of the self-made man"

but granddaughter

Mention this status only when relevant: leave "battling grannies" and similar examples of ageism and sexism to the tabloids; in particular we should avoid such patronising drivel as "How this 55-year-old granny came to earn $25m a year" (page 1 blurb) – just in case anyone still didn't get the message, the front of G2 said: "She's five foot two, she's a grandmother and she earns $25m a year"

plural grands prix

one word

England, Wales and Scotland; if you want to include Northern Ireland, use Britain or the UK

in general, we use "accepted" Anglicised names: Andros, Cephalonia, Corfu (not Kerkira), Ithaca, Kos, Paxos, Rhodes, Santorini (not Thira), Symi (with a Y) BUT Lefkada (not Lefkas. It's modern ... )

Greek places: Peloponnese (not Peloponnessus), Thessaloniki (not Salonika)

a green activist, the green movement, but uc when referring to so-named political parties, eg the German Greens

designated areas around cities subject to strict planning controls, not open countryside in general

one that has not been built on before; one that has been built on before is a brownfield site

see apostrophes

Energy from the Earth's surface is trapped in the lower atmosphere by gases that prevent it leaking into space, a natural phenomenon that makes life possible, whose enhancement by natural or artificial means may make life impossible. Not the result of the hole in the ozone layer, whose thinning in the upper atmosphere is due to CFCs;the connection is that CFCs are also greenhouse gases

gruesome

bear

TV presenter and chef with his own brand of pasta sauces, former singer with Jet Bronx and the Forbidden

caps for former site of World Trade Centre in New York, lc for referring to the exact location of explosions, eg at Hiroshima in 1945

an intransitive verb, so flowers may grow but companies don't "grow profits" and governments don't "grow economies"

(1928-67) Argentine-born revolutionary

cap M if you use the word, although it is not normally necessary. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Guggenheim in New York, Frank Gehry the one in Bilbao (and another proposed for Abu Dhabi). We have sometimes confused the two

not "Girl Guides"; the organisation is Girlguiding UK

(City of London), not "the Guildhall"

formerly French Guinea, a republic in north-west Africa that became independent in 1958; do not confuse with Equatorial Guinea, French Guiana, Guinea-Bissau, or Guyana

formerly Portuguese Guinea, independent since 1974, lying on the coast to the north-west of Guinea

younger readers may not be aware that a guinea was worth £1 1s (£1.05) unless they buy or sell racehorses (the buyer still pays the auction house in guineas, and the auction house then gives the vendor the same number of pounds, thus netting the auctioneer their 5% commission)

not the Persian or Arabian Gulf

the first, and proper, Gulf war is now known as the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88). 1991 was the Gulf war: 2003 was the Iraq war

of 1991

not gunbattle, and not "firefight"

the former Great Universal Stores split into the credit rating agency Experian and Home Retail Group in 2006

not gutteral

formerly British Guiana, a nation in South America that gained its independence in 1812; not to be confused with French Guiana or the three African states of Equatorial Guinea, Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau; its inhabitants are Guyanese (noun and adjective), not Guyanan