Intitulate

Intitulate is a transitive verb meaning to provide a title for a work or to name something by a title. It describes the act of assigning a formal or descriptive heading to a document, manuscript, or other object. In practice, authors and cataloguers may use the term to specify that a title has been given or attributed to a work.

Etymology and history: The word derives from Latin roots related to titulus, meaning title, and the prefix in- or a sense of placing onto. In English, intitulate appears in older or scholarly contexts and is now considered rare or archaic in many usage guides. Because of its obscurity, writers often substitute more common verbs such as title, name, or christen when describing the act of naming a work.

Usage and usage notes: Intitulate is typically used in formal or bibliographic language to indicate that a document has been given a title. It is not interchangeable with entitle, which generally means to grant a right or privilege rather than to inscribe a title on a work. Because intitulate is infrequently encountered in modern prose, contemporary writers usually prefer clearer expressions like “gave the work the title,” “titled the manuscript,” or simply “named the work.”

See also: intitule; titulature; title (as a verb); entitle. In technical contexts such as digital search interfaces, the related term intitle appears as a query operator used to restrict results to documents containing a specified word in their title.