1

I'm writing a sentence that refers to The Football Association and want to shorten it to the FA, but I'm unsure whether I should capitalise the T in 'the' or not because its official name is The Football Association.

If I capitalise the T, it looks strange to me, however on their own website they do capitalise it (e.g. 'view the latest financial statements of The FA').

So if I were to write a sentence like 'please refer to the FA website', would the T be capitalised or not?

SFraser
  • 11
  • 1
    In your sentence, "the" doesn't modify "FA", it modifies "website", so it should be small. If you want to include a capitalized "The", you would have to write "to the website of The FA" or "to The FA's website" (since "to the The FA website" doesn't work at all). – Peter Shor Jun 20 '19 at 16:30
  • 1
    @PeterShor: Arguably the "The" should be lowercase even in the form "the website of [The or the] FA." The FA website itself is inconsistent on this point: its Who We Are page includes consecutive captions that say, respectively, "Senior Management Team Working with The FA Board, Council and staff" and "The FA Board and Committee Full details of the FA Board and Committee." I suppose the key question to answer is whether "The FA" is more like "The Hague" or "the United Nations." – Sven Yargs Jun 20 '19 at 16:55
  • 1
    @SvenYargs: the website seems generally not to capitalize The when FA is used as an adjective, as in "Match-fixing, or breaching the FA betting rules, or using inside information, is serious stuff." It generally does when it's used as a noun in the middle of a sentence, as in "involved in fixing, then you must report it to The FA immediately." So I suspect "with The FA Board" is an error (it's quite hard to keep this distinction straight, so it's completely understandable.) – Peter Shor Jun 20 '19 at 17:06
  • 1
    @PeterShor Articles would only be capitalized in actual titles of songs, books, plays, etc., but never otherwise. So the team is just the Yankees and such, never *The Yankees. This has become so frighteningly common a mistake that I wonder how it is that kids are no longer taught how to read and write English. – tchrist Jun 20 '19 at 20:00
  • 1
    @tchrist the Yankees' full name is just 'Yankees' though, so I can see why 'the' would be lower case. With The Football Association, however, the 'the' is actually part of its name (on its logo it says 'The FA'). – SFraser Jun 21 '19 at 08:07
  • @SFraser You can't judge name from a logo. Logos are just stylistic representations. You have to go by official text. In this case, the website itself is entirely inconsistent. In the case of the White House, the is not part of the name itself, and is only capitalized when it's the first word in a sentence. But in the case of The Boss (Bruce Springsteen), The *is* part of his nickname and it's always capitalized, regardless of where it's located in a sentence. – Jason Bassford Jun 21 '19 at 18:04
  • 1
    Possible duplicate of Capitalisation in texts where the title is also a concept that is referred to within the text? – Jason Bassford Jun 21 '19 at 18:05

0 Answers0