Learn English – Using articles before titles beginning with articles

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What are the rules for the use of articles before titles beginning with articles? Which of the following sentences is correct?

  1. I went to the The New York Times office this morning.
  2. I went to The New York Times office this morning.
  3. I went to the New York Times office this morning.
  4. I am reading a The New York Times article.
  5. I am reading a New York Times article.

Are "the The" and "a The" grammatical? If not, which is the article that should be dropped? Or is it simply a question of style?

According to Google, there are 90.3 million instances of "the The New York Times" on the Internet including 340,000 hits within the nytimes.com domain. I'm sure that there are plenty of false positives, but there are genuine cases too such as in the following sentence:

Writers from the The New York Times Dining section share Thanksgiving memories.

Best Answer

From grammatical considerations, some thumb rules for convenience could be applied. However, the question is largely one of style and less about grammar.

Firstly, when the title begins with an article, it is not always necessary to cite the article of the title. 'The New York Times' is referred to as the 'New York Times' in practice.

I went to the The New York Times office this morning.

Secondly, when the title beginning article is the same as the article required before the title, it need not be repeated.

I went to the The New York Times office this morning.

Thumb rule (2) provides an alternative to (1) so you may chose between capitalizing the article and not.

In the case of different articles as in

I am reading a The New York Times article.

use thumb rule (1). Here the grammatical requirement of an article is more important.

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