[1][2][3][4] Some proper nouns occur in plural form (optionally or exclusively), and then they refer to groups of entities considered as unique (the Hendersons, the Everglades, the Azores, the Pleiades).
Otherwise, they normally only take modifiers that add emotive coloring, such as old Mrs Fletcher, poor Charles, or historic York; in a formal style, this may include the, as in the inimitable Henry Higgins.
The indefinite article a may similarly be used to establish a new referent: the column was written by a [or one] Mary Price.
Entities with proper names that use the definite article include geographical features (e.g., the Mediterranean, the Thames), buildings (e.g., the Parthenon), institutions (e.g., the House of Commons), cities and districts (e.g., The Hague, the Bronx), works of literature (e.g., the Bible), newspapers and magazines (e.g., The Times, The Economist, the New Statesman),[17] and events (e.g., the '45, the Holocaust).
Such plural proper names include mountain ranges (e.g., the Himalayas), and collections of islands (e.g., the Hebrides).
When such proper nouns are grouped together, sometimes only a single definite article will be used at the head (e.g., "the Nile, Congo, and Niger").
The definite article is not used in the presence of preceding possessives (e.g., "Da Vinci's Mona Lisa", "our United Kingdom"), demonstratives (e.g., "life in these United States", "that spectacular Alhambra"), interrogatives (e.g., "whose Mediterranean: Rome's or Carthage's"), or words like "no" or "another" (e.g., "that dump is no Taj Mahal", "neo-Nazis want another Holocaust").
The definite article is omitted when such a proper noun is used attributively (e.g., "Hague residents are concerned ...", "... eight pints of Thames water ...").
If a definite article is present, it is for the noun, not the attributive (e.g., "the Amazon jungle", "the Bay of Pigs debacle").
Vocative phrases that address a proper noun also cause the article to be dropped (e.g., "jump that shark, Fonz!
In a grouping, a single definite article at the head may be understood to cover for the others (e.g., "the Germany of Hitler, British Empire of Churchill, United States of Roosevelt, and Soviet Union of Stalin").
Headlines, which often simplify grammar for space or punchiness, frequently omit both definite and indefinite articles.
[11] In languages that use alphabetic scripts and that distinguish lower and upper case, there is usually an association between proper names and capitalization.
For example, expressions for days of the week and months of the year are capitalized in English, but not in Spanish, French, Swedish, or Finnish, though they may be understood as proper names in all of these.
Languages differ in whether most elements of multiword proper names are capitalized (American English has House of Representatives, in which lexical words are capitalized) or only the initial element (as in Slovenian Državni zbor, "National Assembly").
Although these rules have been standardized, there are enough gray areas that it can often be unclear both whether an item qualifies as a proper name and whether it should be capitalized: "the Cuban missile crisis" is often capitalized ("Cuban Missile Crisis") and often not, regardless of its syntactic status or its function in discourse.
When the comes at the start of a proper name, as in the White House, it is not normally capitalized unless it is a formal part of a title (of a book, film, or other artistic creation, as in The Keys to the Kingdom).
Such capitalization indicates that the term is a conventional designation for exactly that species (Sialia currucoides),[22] not for just any bluebird that happens to live in the mountains.
Such words that vary according to case are sometimes called capitonyms (although only rarely: this term is scarcely used in linguistic theory and does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary).
In Egyptian hieroglyphs, parts of a royal name were enclosed in a cartouche: an oval with a line at one end.
In the standard Pinyin system of romanization for Mandarin Chinese, capitalization is used to mark proper names,[27] with some complexities because of different Chinese classifications of nominal types,[g] and even different notions of such broad categories as word and phrase.
However, if the object already had an established name, there was a difference between inanimate objects and animals: In English, children employ different strategies depending on the type of referent but also rely on syntactic cues, such as the presence or absence of the determiner "the" to differentiate between common and proper nouns when first learned.