Headlinese

Headlinese is an abbreviated writing style used in newspaper headlines.

Syntax

Because space is limited, headlines are written in a compressed telegraphic style, using special syntactic conventions:

Forms of the verb "to be" are omitted.

Articles are usually omitted.

Most verbs are in the simple present tense, e.g. "Governor signs bill".

The future is expressed as "to" followed by a verb, e.g. "Governor to sign bill".

In the US (but not the UK), conjunctions are often replaced by a comma, as in "Bush, Blair laugh off microphone mishap".

To save space, a long word is sometimes replaced by a shorter word with not quite the same meaning, e.g. "attack" to mean "criticize".

Country names are often used instead of their adjective form, e.g. "Russia fires warning shot at Turkey boat ".

Headlines are generally sentences or noun phrases.

Short forms

Individuals are usually named by their last name only, with no honorifics.

Organizations and institutions are often named by metonymy: "Wall Street" for "the financial industry", "Whitehall" for the UK government administration, "Madrid" for "the government of Spain", "Davos" for "World Economic Forum", and so on.

This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - https://wn.com/Headlinese

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Headlinese

Syntax

Short forms

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