Are we in Twixmas or Twixtmas? Do dinosaurs have capital letters? Is space measured in kilometres or miles? These are some of the questions we thought would be easy to answer when we were appointed as editors of the Guardian style guide in October.

Journalists on the Guardian contact us every day wanting to know the correct style for the terminology in the articles they are writing or editing, and we need to make a ruling on each, or sometimes update an existing one. If there are style guide queries with obvious answers, we haven’t encountered one yet. One colleague asked if the abbreviation AI had entered the language, and was it necessarily generative or just gen? Another told us that if journalists drop the al- from Arabic names it is just like dropping the Mc from McDonald.

The introduction to the 1960 edition of the style guide was headed “Neither pedantic nor wild”, and we try to live up to that maxim. There’s a trend towards the permissive in language, as well as towards American English, and we need to reflect how readers speak. But we are cautious not to erode the diversity and complexity of English as it has evolved........

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