Style guide in the context of "Regulatory compliance"

The usage of a language is the ways in which its written and spoken variations are routinely employed by its speakers; that is, it refers to "the collective habits of a language's native speakers", as opposed to idealized models of how a language works (or should work) in the abstract. For instance, Fowler characterized usage as "the way in which a word or phrase is normally and correctly used" and as the "points of grammar, syntax, style, and the choice of words." In everyday usage, language is used differently, depending on the situation and individual. Individual language users can shape language structures and language usage based on their community.

In the descriptive tradition of language analysis, by way of contrast, "correct" tends to mean functionally adequate for the purposes of the speaker or writer using it, and adequately idiomatic to be accepted by the listener or reader; usage is also, however, a concern for the prescriptive tradition, for which "correctness" is a matter of arbitrating style.

A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), by H. W. Fowler (1858–1933), is a style guide to British English usage and writing. It covers a wide range of topics that relate to usage, including: plurals, nouns, verbs, punctuation, cases, parentheses, quotation marks, the use of foreign terms, and so on. The dictionary became the standard for other style guides to writing in English. The 1926 first edition remains in print, along with the 1965 second edition, which was edited by Ernest Gowers, and was reprinted in 1983 and 1987. The 1996 third edition, re-titled The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, and revised in 2004, was mostly rewritten by Robert W. Burchfield as a usage dictionary that incorporated corpus linguistics data. The 2015 fourth edition, re-titled Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, was edited by Jeremy Butterfield as a usage dictionary. Informally, readers refer to the style guide and dictionary as Fowler's Modern English Usage, Fowler, and Fowler's.

Gay is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual. The term originally meant "carefree", "cheerful', or "bright and showy".

While scant usage referring to male homosexuality dates to the late 19th century, that meaning became increasingly common by the mid-20th century. In modern English, gay has come to be used as an adjective, and as a noun, referring to the community, practices and cultures associated with homosexuality. In the 1960s, gay became the word favored by homosexual men to describe their sexual orientation. By the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century, the word gay was recommended by major LGBTQ groups and style guides to describe people attracted to members of the same sex, although it is more commonly used to refer specifically to men.

Capitalization (American English) or capitalisation (Commonwealth English) is writing a word with its first letter as a capital letter (uppercase letter) and the remaining letters in lower case, in writing systems with a case distinction. The term also may refer to the use of uppercase letters in general, or the choice between uppercase and lowercase.

Conventional writing systems (orthographies) for different languages have different conventions for capitalization, for example, the capitalization of titles. Conventions also vary, to a lesser extent, between different style guides. In addition to the Latin script, capitalization also affects the Armenian, Cyrillic, Georgian and Greek alphabets.

An Olympic-size swimming pool is a swimming pool which conforms to the regulations for length, breadth, and depth made by World Aquatics (formerly FINA) for swimming at the Summer Olympics and the swimming events at the World Aquatics Championships. Different size regulations apply for other pool-based events, such as diving, synchronized swimming, and water polo. Less onerous breadth and depth regulations exist for lesser swimming competitions, but any "long course" event requires a course length of 50 metres (164 ft 0.5 in), as distinct from "short course" which applies to competitions in pools that are 25 metres (82 ft 0 in) in length (or 75 feet (22.9 m) in the United States). If touch pads are used in competition, then the distance is relative to the touch pads at either end of the course, so that the pool itself is generally oversized to allow for the width of the pads.

An Olympic-size swimming pool is used as a colloquial unit of volume, to make approximate comparisons to similarly sized objects or volumes. It is not a specific definition, as there is no maximum limit on the depth of an Olympic pool. The value has an order of magnitude of 1 megaliter (ML). Some style guides caution against the hyperbole of describing any relatively large pool as "Olympic-size[d]".

Ni-Vanuatu (informally abbreviated Ni-Van) is a large group of closely related Melanesian ethnic groups native to the island country of Vanuatu. As such, ni-Vanuatu are a mixed ethnolinguistic group with a shared ethnogenesis that speak a multitude of languages.

The ni-Vanuatu or ni-Van is usually restricted to the indigenous population of Vanuatu. It contrasts with the demonym Vanuatuan, which in principle refers to any citizen of Vanuatu, regardless of their origin or ethnicity. (The form Vanuatuan is in fact rarely used in English, and is regarded as incorrect by some authors and style guides.)