The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage: The Official Style Guide Used by the Writers and Editors of the World's Most Authoritative Newspaper is a style guide

Style guide

A style guide or style manual is a set of standards for the writing and design of documents, either for general use or for a specific publication, organization or field...

 created in 1950 by editors at the newspaper and revised in 1974 and 1999 by Allan M. Siegal

Allan M. Siegal

Allan M. Siegal is an American journalist who spent nearly all of his long career at The New York Times.Siegal joined the Times in 1960 as a copy boy.His last post at the Times was as standards editor. He retired in May 2006-Bibliography:...

 and William G. Connolly

William G. Connolly

William G. Connolly, is a co-author of The New York Times style guide and a member of the executive committee of the American Copy Editors Society....

. The revised and expanded paperback edition is copyright 2002. According to the Times Deputy News Editor, Philip P. Corbett (who is in charge of revising the manual), there is a more current, online version of the manual that is used by Times staff, but this online manual is not available to the general public.

Although it was written for New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

journalists, it has also been published for use by others. Much of the information is specific to neither The Times nor New York.

Some differences between the Associated Press's style manual and that of The New York Times are:

• The Timess uses double S's for possessives. This is a deviation from AP style.
• The Timess manual gives rationale for many practices for which The AP Stylebook does not.
• The Timess guide is self-indexed, while the Associated Press's book has separate sections for sports and weather entries, and it combines many entries under such terms as "weapons" and "weather."
• The Timess book has some whimsical entries, such as one for how to spell shh.
• The Timess book requires that the surnames of subjects (sports-related columns being the most notable exceptions) be prefixed with a title (such as Dr., Mr., Ms., or Mrs.).
• The Timess spells "e-mail" using a hyphen, while AP removed the hyphen in the 2011 edition of its stylebook.