4.17 Time references and historical periods and events

Capitalize the names of months and days, of holidays and holy days, of historical and geological periods and events, and of parliamentary sessions:

• Wednesday
• October
• Thanksgiving Day
• Passover
• Christmas
• April Fools’ Day
• The First Session of
• the Ice Age
• the Second World War
• World War II
• the Middle Ages
• the Gulf War
• the Pleistocene Epoch
• the Thirty-second Parliament

Do not capitalize the names of the seasons, centuries or decades unless they are personified or are part of special names:

• spring
• winter
• the twentieth century
• the fifties

but

• the Roaring Twenties (name of an era)
• the Winter Palace

Capitalize the names of events recorded in sacred writings and of historical events with a strong religious dimension:

• the Flood
• the Exodus
• the Immaculate Conception
• the Crucifixion
• the Crusades
• the Reformation
• the Great Schism
• the Hegira
• the Diet of Worms
• the Second Vatican Council

Terms that refer to events and periods are often capitalized when they refer to specific events or periods and lower-cased when used in a general sense:

• the Ice Age
• the First World War
• the Quiet Revolution
• the Crusades
• Stone Age hunting implements

• the most recent ice age
• the two world wars
• She started a revolution.
• a crusade against poverty
• He uses stone-age management techniques.

For the use of capitals with time zones, see 1.22 Time zones.

© Public Works and Government Services Canada, 2013
TERMIUM Plus^®, the Government of Canada's terminology and linguistic data bank
Writing Tools – The Canadian Style
A product of the Translation Bureau