Incipit

Although not always called by the name of incipit today, the practice of referring to texts by their initial words remains commonplace.

The catalog was meant to be used by the very limited number of official scribes who had access to the archives, and the width of a clay tablet and its resolution did not permit long entries.

In rabbinic usage, the incipit is known as the "dibur ha-matḥil" (דיבור המתחיל), or "beginning phrase", and refers to a section heading in a published monograph or commentary that typically, but not always, quotes or paraphrases a classic biblical or rabbinic passage to be commented upon or discussed.

The published mystical and exegetical discourses of the Chabad-Lubavitch rebbes (called "ma'amarim"), derive their titles almost exclusively from the "dibur ha-matḥil" of the individual work's first chapter.

Each chapter in the Quran, with the exception of the ninth, begins with Bismillah Al-Rahman Al-Rahim -- meaning "in the name of God, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful.

Traditionally, papal bulls and encyclicals, documents issued under the authority of the Pope, are referenced by their Latin incipit.

That such a use is an incipit and not a title is most obvious when the line breaks off in the middle of a grammatical unit (e.g., Shakespeare's sonnet 55 "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments").

They typically feature the first few bars of a piece, often with the most prominent musical material written on a single staff (the examples given at right show both the single-staff and full-score incipit variants).

Notable examples include FCKGW (used by Windows XP) and 09 F9 (used by Advanced Access Content System).