Wikipedia:WikiProject Cue sports/Spelling conventions

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WikiProject Cue sports article and category spelling conventions

[Article introductory paragraph goes here. Nine-ball, being the most popular professional cue sport, and also a complex case because it can be seen as being named either for its "money ball" and/or its number of object balls, has been chosen as the example game (and ball) for the spelling conventions, but they are generally applicable to all games and balls.]

Contents 1 Summary 2 The game 3 The ball 4 Other 5 Footnotes 6 References

[edit] Summary

• nine-ball = the game and only the game — hyphenation mandatory, numeral forbidden, capitalization forbidden (except as "Nine-ball" at sentence beginning, in book title, etc.) The only hyphenation exception for compounded game names is blackball, which is internationally standardized under this name.
• the 9 ball = the ball and only the ball — hyphenation forbidden (including grammatically optional hyphenation of adjective phrase as in "nice 9 ball shot"), numeral mandatory (exception "Nine (9) ball" at sentence beginning deprecated). The definite article is generally mandatory except where superfluous/ungrammatical.
• nine ball = adjective phrase referring to number of balls, as in "a nice nine ball run" — grammatically optional hypenation forbidden, numeral forbidden.
• ninth ball = phrase referring to order of balls — hyphenation generally not relevant, numeral forbidden
• nine games = phrase refering to something other than balls; hyphenation generally not relevant, numeral forbidden (with very limited exceptions, e.g. "the carom billiards game 18.2 balkline")
• 9-ball = forbidden, except in article intro sentence as a colloquial alternate spelling (and even then only if applicable as per details below).
• nineball = forbidden.
• 9ball = forbidden.
• cue ball = the ball; never call it just "the cue"; do not compound it.
• cue stick = the implement, unless being more specific then drop "stick" (e.g. "snooker cue"); never call it just "the cue" or compound it.
• bridge stick or mechanical bridge is the reach-extending tool; don't use "rake", "granny stick", etc.
• cue sport(s) = the general topic, singular (plural); don't use "cuesport(s)", as this term has no established currency; use "cue game(s)" only for non-tournament variants like bar billiards. Informal use of "game(s)" is fine.
• carom-billiards = forbidden &mdash do not hyphenate non-compound names.

Key: forbidden means don't do it at all (unless an exception enumerated below applies); mandatory means always do it (unless an exception enumerated below applies); and deprecated means don't do it unless it is absolutely necessary; try rewriting to avoid it.

[edit] The game

• The canonical name of the game [in English], for Wikipedia purposes, is "nine-ball". The correct names of the game, outside the Wikipedia context, are (and grammatically must be) "nine-ball" or "9-ball", but we eschew "9-ball" on Wikipedia as a name of the game to avoid confusion, as explained below. It is not "Nine-ball" - games are not proper nouns (cf. football, badminton, chess, etc.) It is certainly not "Nine-Ball" - second and subsequent word parts are not capitalized in hyphenated compounds, even if the compounds are proper nouns, unless also proper names, publication titles or the like (e.g. "Jane Foster-Smythe")^[1]. The game also is not named "nine ball" [nor "Nine Ball" for capitalization reasons already given above]. Why? Because: First, sport/game names that end in "ball" are almost universally compounded in English^[A] And cf. the more similarly-named bowling games of nine-pins and ten-pins, which are traditionally both spelled out and hyphenated.^[B]. Second, the adjective has fused to the noun to form a compound noun - without the adjective being integrated into the noun, it is simply a random noun modified by a random adjective like "hot soup" or "ugly dog", and the results are nonsensical in the context of what nine-ball actually is (a thing named, cohesive, integral and indivisible; not a thing described) - one cannot reasonably say "we were playing a game of ball, the nine kind" in reference to this game [unless related to Yoda one is perhaps, hmm?]; "nine-ball" is a concept an sich, and ergo it is necessarily a compound noun^[C]. And third, perhaps most importantly, if it is not compounded and the adjective remains unbound to the noun, it is free to modify entire noun phrases that follow it or to be distanced from the noun by insertions, with confusing and ambiguous results - an example within an earlier version of the nine-ball article itself demonstrated this ambiguity: "nine ball rules", which could just as easily mean "nine rules about balls" or "rules about nine balls". (Other words besides "rules", such as "games", cause similar ambiguities.) If we have just "nine ball rules" instead of the inseparable "nine-ball rules", we can also have "nine confusing ball rules"; note that we cannot have "nine-confusing-ball rules" without there being an identifiable, unified thing called "nine-confusing-ball" [which one supposes might be a future game with balls technologically able to randomly change their color and symbols on the fly...] Compounding the noun to its erstwhile adjective prevents any insertions (or more to the point, signals that such insertion isn't even possible; the phrase is immediately and naturally parsed as a compound noun.

• The term "9-ball" is an acceptable short version in any context except the billiards-related Wikipedia articles. Rationale: Indeed, the "9-ball" spelling is conceptually perhaps even more correct than "nine-ball" (for symbol vs. number-per-se reasons that become clear below), and is commonly used in the industry. But firstly, it will be too difficult and awkward to restructure the large number of sentences that naturally should begin with this phrase just to avoid ungrammatically starting sentences with numerals instead of capital letters; and, far more seriously, it will remain hard to read and understand these articles if the usage is not just logically sound but also visually distinct, and this distinction is consistently maintained. The one time 9-ball construction can be used in Wikipedia billiards articles is in the first sentence of the article about that game, as an alternative colloquial name, e.g.:

Nine-ball (colloquially also "9-ball") is a pocket billiards game [...]

• The name of the game must not be run-together. Incorrect examples: "nineball", "9ball".

• Game names that are not compound nouns must not be hyphenated. Incorrect examples: "bank-pool", "English-billiards", "skittle-pool", "carom-billiards". All of those are simply adjectives modifying nouns - games described and differenced from other games in the same general class.

[edit] The ball

• The ball itself is, and must be, "the 9 ball", in all cases. It cannot logically be "the 9-ball", because it is not a compound noun, but simply a noun modified by an identifying adjective, like "my shoe" or "Dante's Inferno" - unlike the game of nine-ball, the 9 ball really is just a thing with a (symbolic in this case) descriptor that differentiates it from several other similar things (balls) within the same context (the pool table at hand). "The 9 ball" is simply short for "the number-9 ball" — we see clearly that it is an adjectival phrase modifying a simple noun, "ball"; it is not a compound noun — one would not write "the number-9-ball" or "the number 9-ball" so we cannot logically write "the 9-ball" either. Similarly, if we had a custom pool ball set with different symbols we might refer to the "ankh ball" and the "mu ball", and there is no reason to hyphenate such phrases. Indeed, doing so can lead to more confusion that it solves (e.g., "the +-terminal and --terminal on the battery"!) As with the game itself, it is not a proper noun, like the title of a book, so "the 9 Ball" is out of the question. It is also not "the nine ball" - it does not say "nine" on it, and the numeral it bears is not really a number per se, but simply a symbol.^[D] This does mean that it would not be grammatical to begin a sentence with a bare reference to the 9 ball, without an article or other preceding word; but, oh well - we have the same problem with the poet e.e. cummings, yet the field of literary criticism has simply dealt with it (almost universally respecting his wishes to remain all-lower-case), and somehow survived unscathed. It is hard to think of such a sentence in the first place. Perhaps something like "9 ball shots are the most often missed in nine-ball due to what is colloquially known as 'choking'." Which sounds kind of funny anyway because it is ambiguous and silly ("9 shots on a specific ball? 9 shots on any balls? Huh?"); Most people would write "The 9 ball shot is the most often missed..." See below for how to handle cases where it is felt that a sentence "must" begin with an unadorned reference to the 9 ball. Finally, of course it can't be "the 9 Ball" or "the 9-Ball" (capitalized) for reasons already discussed.

• An acceptable informal short version is "the 9". It is not "the nine" (nor "the Nine"; see above about capitalization^[E]). Again, this ball is not labelled "nine" (except perhaps on some custom-designed balls somewhere), but "9". NB: It would never, except at the beginning of a sentence or book (etc.) title, be "The 9" with a capital "T".

• The "the" is generally mandatory, except where the indefinite article, a more specfic reference, or a clause providing such, precedes "9", or cannot grammatically do so. Examples, respectively: "a 9 ball shot", "that 9 ball opportunity", "first shoot the 7 ball, then the 8 and 9", "Nine (9) balls keep getting stolen from our tables." (emphasis added for clarity).

• If one "insists" on begining a sentence with a bare reference to the ball itself, it must, in Wikipedia billiards articles, be rendered as "Nine (9) ball..." to prevent ambiguity. (Especially for non-native English speakers; few languages are as cavalier and confusing about operator overloading of number usage as is English.) This formatting applies to other numbered balls besides the 9, of course. About the only reason to do this would be a sentence in which more than one 9 ball were referred to (e.g. "Nine (9) balls keep getting stolen from our tables."), but there are other ways to phrase such sentences. Deprecated.

• Grammatically optional hyphenation of ball names when used as adjective phrase is not used in Wikipedia articles on billiards. While many would normally prefer to write "a 9-ball shot" it must be written "a 9 ball shot", here, for disambiguation reasons. (NB: If the phrase were intended to mean "a shot in a game of nine-ball", it would be rendered "a nine-ball shot".)

• Plurals are formed in the same manner. Examples: "the 1, 2 and 3 balls", "the 1 through 15 balls" (Note: "the 1-15 balls" is deprecated as potentially confusing.)

• The ball and its label/name must not be run-together. Incorrect examples: "nineball", "9ball", "cueball", "objectball", "redball". (The same goes for non-ball implements. Do not use compounded constructions, like "pooltable" or "snookercue" — or "pool-table" or "snooker-cue" for that matter — for terms that are not compounds.)

[edit] Other

• References to the count of or succession of balls should always be in the form "nine balls", "ninth ball", etc. To avoid confusion, they should be spelled out (no numerals like "9 balls left", "or sank his 9th ball in a row in the straight pool match") — it's standard English usage to spell it out anyway^[1] — and not hyphenated, either.

• Optional hyphenating of number-mentioning compound adjectives should be studiously avoided in the context of billiards-related articles on Wikipedia. For obvious reasons of ambiguity and ensuing confusion, even if one's dialect or preferred register normally calls for it, one should not write, "She pulled off an astounding nine-ball run in bank pool." A previous example could grammatically have read "the 9-ball shot is the most often missed...", but the visually confusing ambiguity of this style is immediately evident. Use "nine ball run" or "run of nine balls" in the former type of case and "the 9 ball shot" or "pocketing the 9 ball", etc., in the latter.

• The convention on naming of the game shall apply, in its entirety, to games named for the winning ball. E.g., "eight-ball" (colloquially "8-ball"), which is played with seven striped and seven solid object balls, plus the money ball and the cue ball. Likewise "three-ball" (colloquially "3-ball"), because in some popular rules variants it is a nine-ball style rotation game with the 3 as the money ball. This directive supercedes the one immediately below (e.g., nine-ball qualifies under both criteria; the first is applied, not the second.)

• The convention on naming of the game shall apply, except for the one-time usage of the "9-ball" format in the article introduction sentence as an alternative colloquial spelling, to games named for the number of objects used in the game. This holds regardless of whether the objects are object balls ("seven-ball"), total balls ("three-ball billiards") or non-ball objects ("five-pins", "one-cushion"). Usage of such appellations as "3-cushion", "1-pocket", etc. for such games is grammatically unsound and simply lazy; it is also inappropriate in that the objects enumerated are simply counted, and unlike the 8 and 9 balls do not bear numerals on them as symbols. Wikipedia should not encourage such usages as valid alternate spellings in article introductions, though #REDIRECT pages should silently take people to the correct article if they use these spellings in seeking out articles.

• The convention on naming of the ball shall apply to all games and all balls. This applies to non-numbered balls (e.g., "the cue ball", not "the cue-ball", or worse yet "the cueball"), including generic references (e.g., "the solid ball", not "the solid-ball"), and references to balls in other games or in custom ball sets that have some sort of symbol other than a number (e.g. "the star ball", not "the star-ball").

• The convention on refering to the count or sequence of balls shall also apply to non-ball objects, whether numbered or not. For example, pins/skittles or shake bottle pills/peas. E.g., "I knocked over all five pins" not "...all 5 pins"; "I drew the number-five pill", not "...5 pill". (While "...5 pill" would be correct under the same theory as "the 9 ball", in the Wikipedia context the similarity of the former to the latter will be visually confusing to readers and editors.) Let numerals in these articles always refer to numbered balls, except where numeric usage is utterly ingrained (e.g., "18.2 balkline", "14.1 continuous").

• Commercial or popular [mis]usage is of no consequence; but respect organization names and publication titles. The fact that some pro tour, company, organization, tournament, etc., may use a spelling such as "9-Ball" or "Nine Ball" or "9 Ball" is of no relevance. The industry as a whole evidences no standardization of terminology and its spelling. Articles about a tournament or the like will use the spelling conventions in this [draft] guideline, e.g. "World Nine-ball Championship", regardless of the spelling used on marketing materials, though a redirect from the colloquial spelling to the normalized one is advised. The official name of an organization, or title of a book (or movie, TV show or other item usually given an italicized title), on the other hand, will be spelled in Wikipedia as it was spelled originally, with a redirect existing from the "Wikipedia-correct" spelling to the official one.

• Game names that are fully compounded, on an industry-wide basis, shall remain that way in Wikipedia articles. As of this writing, the only known example is blackball, an internationally standardizing variant of eight-ball. This guideline would otherwise recommend "black-ball", but as the English language preference is to eventually fully compound such phrases into a single word (cf. baseball, football, etc.), Wikipedia will not resist this process. Please note that the term "the black ball" in reference to a ball rather than the game should not be hyphenated or compounded, as per the convention on ball naming ("9 ball", "cue ball", etc.)

• The sports as a class are "cue sports"; singular is "cue sport". Avoid the contracted "cuesport(s)"; this variant has much less currency, and is ambiguous ("what's a port for cues?") Don't use "cue sport(s)" when something more specific and non-ambiguous can be used instead (NB: "billiard(s)" is generally too ambiguous unless qualified). Likewise, don't use "pocket billiards" (a large class of games) for "pool" (a smaller one) when the latter will do, or use "pool" when something more specific such as "nine-ball" is intended. "Cue game(s)" can be used, but should be reserved for activities that are not the subject of regional, national or international competition, e.g. bagatelle and bar billiards. A game or set of games (whether cue sports or not) can be referred to informally (i.e. anywhere in the article other than the intro sentence) with the word "game(s)" alone.

• The cue ball is the "cue ball"; the cue stick is the "cue stick". A bare reference to "the cue" is usually too ambiguous. The cue ball must never be referred to as "the cue", despite common spoken shorthand of this fashion, due to the cue ball vs. cue stick ambiguity. When speaking generally, the hand-held implement is "the cue stick"; when speaking of specific games, the term can be more specific (three cushion & straight rail, etc. = "billiards cue", "carom cue" or "carambole cue"; pool = "pool cue"; snooker = "snooker cue"), and the word "stick" dropped. The terms must not be compounded, i.e. as "cuestick" or (as already addressed above) "cueball".

• The reach-assisting implement is "the bridge stick" or "the mechanical bridge". It should not be referred to simply as "bridge", because this term also refers to the forward hand. It must not be referred to by colloquial names like "rake" or "granny stick", as these names are meaningless to people from different parts of the world, while everyone undstands what "bridge stick" means.

• Spelling flames and "correction fascism" are condemned: Divergence from this [draft] consensus standard in an article by an editor should simply be corrected without remonstrance or criticism. Non-standard usage in talk pages should be completely tolerated, with no criticism and especially no edits of others' posts, just as with any other typo or spelling/usage preference or quirk (cf. WP:EQ). This [draft] consensus standard is for the rendering of article (including caption and heading) text, and article and categories names, only, and though hopefully it would influence and clarify usage elsewhere, it is not intended to have any applicability as a standard elsewhere, within or without Wikipedia. And it is expressly not expected that the average, occasional editor of these articles will or should memorize this standard, only that clean-up editors who have done so and who enforce it will not be attacked for this nor have their clean-up edits reverted.

[edit] Footnotes

1. Admittedly most are not hypenated today [which used to be spelled "to-day"], with "stick-ball" being a common optional exception; but in their early days these games were univerally referred to as "foot-ball", "base-ball", etc., and the particularly old ones were originally written as two words, before the "-ball" convention evolved. Cf. also "e-mail" ⇒ "email", etc. — compounding and the eventual dehyphenization of compounds, to form new unified words, are very common processes in English. But contrast these compounded sports names with "ice hockey" and "field hockey", or "long jump" and "high jump", etc.; in references to games and pastimes, this compounding phenomenon is mostly peculiar to "ball" and "skat[e|ing]" sports and games, and a few othres, and those inspired by them, e.g. "snowboarding" from "skateboarding". One day, generations from now, we will surely play nineball [though surely not 9ball!], but this is not anywhere close to a standard usage yet (a non-exhaustive scan of a dozen books on pool, and a small stack of Billiards Digest and other pool mags, revealed no occurrences of the "9ball" spelling and only a handful of "nineball" instances). [back]
2. Note also that for "number-named" games the names of which refer to the number of balls being used, such as "eight-ball", "three-ball billiards" and "seven-ball", the name is both an in-and-of-itself a compound noun by being a reference to a game an sich and a compound adjective, making the hyphen even more appropriate. Since only someone who already knows perhaps more about a given game than they would learn from reading the article about it here is likely to know whether or not the game in question is named for its money ball or its number of balls, the consistent use of game name in the hyphenated format "nine-ball" is doubly indicated; applying a standard of "nine ball" name formatting to some games and "nine-ball" to others, based on this distinction, would be even more confusing than the overall usage before this Wikipedia standard was drafted! [back]
3. This is a common feature of English; e.g.: "I did a Wikipedia look-up on 'billiards' last night" - it was not an upward glance, even metaphorically, but a "look-up", which despite its etymology has a distinct synergistic meaning as a compound noun that differs greatly from the simple sum of its two parts. Indeed, a game based on the non-synergistic concept "9 ball" (no hyphen) would be pretty boring, what with only one ball to shoot at! [back]
4. Cf. "X-ray" - though we prounounce it "ecks-ray" we never spell it that way, and it is only very infrequently misspelled "x-ray" in scientific literature, because scientists know that "X" is a symbol not a letter of the alphabet as such, in this context. X-rays are not one type of ray in a series ranging from "a" through "z"; rather, the X is an arbirary, symbolic designation. Just like the numbers (which could just as easily have been letters or Egyptian hieroglyphs) on pool balls. The numbers were added simply to tell the balls apart specifically rather than just by "suit" (as still evidenced even today by the fact that the British, among others, do not regularly call shots, and thus do not typically use numbered object balls, other than the adopted 8 ball). Obviously nine-ball and other more obscure numerical rotation games were invented to take advantage of the already existing numbers (it would be absurd to posit that such games existed before numbered balls but with no one actually playing them until unfulfilled demand resulted in numbering being added to balls!) So, they are symbols. We do not spell out symbols, unless those symbols do not exist in our character set (e.g. the Artist Formerly Known as Prince's symbol) or would not be understood by the target audience (e.g. we write "mu" if the reader cannot be expected to recognize the actual Greek letter). Neither condition applies to "9" of course. Note that "X-ray", aside from being capitalized as a symbol, and The X-Files (which is further capitalized as a title), are both hyphenated as compound nouns, because these two cases — unlike "the 9 ball", but very much like the game of "nine-ball" — refer to unique things named as discrete entities unto themselves, not near-identical things described and differentiated from their neighbors. That is, if the show had been about actual case names filed alphabetically under "X", like "Xavier, James A.", the show would have been called The X Files, and references to the files themselves would be rendered "the X files" with a lower case "f" (and, further, could have correctly been referred to as "the x files" had the show centered on someone obsessed with keeping files about non-proper-noun dictionary words beginning with that letter.) [back]
5. And besides, "the Nine" means something else entirely to anyone who's read "The Lord of the Rings"! [back]

[edit] References

1. ^ ^{a b} H.W. Fowler & E. Gowers A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Oxford U. Pr., UK, 1926/2003, ISBN 0198605064; and H.W. Fowler & R.W. Burchfield, [The New] Fowler's Modern English Usage, 3rd [Rev.] Ed., Oxford U. Pr., UK, 1996/1999/2004, ISBN 0198610211; the former is the highly prescriptive original, the latter the remarkably more descriptive and permissive total rewrite; both agree on these points.)

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