G

Gender or sex

We should only ever ask for a user’s gender or sex if we absolutely need it and genuinely can’t provide our service without it.

If we do need to know a user’s gender or sex, we should have accessibility or usability guidelines on how to ask for this in the right way.

government

Style guides have mixed views on this, but for consistency, we can keep things lower case when we refer to the government.

H

headings and subheadings

Our headings and subheadings should always be written in sentence case (first word capitalised, everything else lower case).

In most cases, they shouldn’t have full stops at the end, unless the heading or subheading has more than one sentence.

HMRC

Always upper case. It’s not ‘the’ HMRC’ and there’s no need to ever write out ‘His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs’ – even the first time it appears on screen.

I

ID

It’s fine to write out ID – there’s no need to ever spell out identification in full.

ie

Rewrite your sentence to avoid using this Latin term.

income tax

GOV.UK capitalises taxes and benefits. But most prominent style guides recommend keeping these lower case – so we should do the same.

Independent Governance Committee

The Independent Governance Committee should always be written out in full first with the shortened version (IGC) in brackets afterwards.

If you only plan to write about the Independent Governance Committee once on a page or screen, there’s no need to introduce IGC in brackets.

See abbreviations and acronyms for more information.

International Bond

If we’re talking about our product, it should always be capitalised.

international bonds

If we’re talking about international bonds in general, there’s no need to capitalise it.

Isa

An individual savings account should only have a capital I (not ISA or isa).