In MLA style, italics are used for titles of long or self-contained works, names of containers like journals and websites, foreign words in English text, and occasional emphasis. The rules follow a consistent logic: if a work is large enough to stand on its own, italicize it. If it’s a smaller piece published inside something larger, use quotation marks instead.
Titles of Long or Self-Contained Works
The core italics rule in MLA centers on titles. You italicize the titles of works that are published independently or exist as complete, standalone creations. This includes:
- Books and novels: Great Expectations, Beloved
- Plays: Hamlet, A Raisin in the Sun
- Films and TV series: Casablanca, The Office
- Albums and long musical compositions: Abbey Road, The Rite of Spring
- Websites: The New York Times, Wikipedia
- Databases: JSTOR, ProQuest
The test is straightforward: could you walk into a store and buy this work as its own item, or find it published under its own name? If yes, italicize it.
Titles That Get Quotation Marks Instead
Shorter works that appear inside a larger publication get quotation marks, not italics. Poems, short stories, articles, essays, individual episodes of a TV series, and songs all fall into this category. You would write “Ode to a Nightingale” (a poem) and “The Cask of Amontillado” (a short story) with quotation marks because both are typically published within a larger collection or anthology.
A quick way to remember: the smaller piece gets quotation marks, and the larger work it lives inside gets italics. An article titled “Climate Policy in 2025” published in The Atlantic demonstrates this pairing perfectly.
Container Titles on the Works Cited Page
MLA uses the concept of a “container,” which is simply the larger source that holds the work you’re citing. A scholarly journal is a container for an article. An anthology is a container for a short story. A streaming platform or website can be a container for a video or blog post. On your Works Cited page, the container title is always italicized.
This rule matters most when citing articles from journals and databases. The article title goes in quotation marks, the journal title is italicized because it’s the container, and if you accessed the article through a database like JSTOR or EBSCOhost, that database name is also italicized as a second container. Getting this layering right is one of the trickiest parts of MLA citations, but the principle stays the same: containers are italicized.
A Title Inside Another Title
Sometimes a title contains another title, and MLA has a specific rule for this. If a book title appears inside an essay title, you style each title according to its own category, regardless of how the original source formats it. For example, if you’re citing an essay called “Survival and Identity in Gone with the Wind,” the essay title gets quotation marks (it’s a short work), while Gone with the Wind stays italicized inside those quotation marks because it’s a novel.
If the situation is reversed and a normally quoted title appears within an italicized title (say, a book about a single poem), you place the shorter title in quotation marks within the italics. The rule is consistent: always format each title the way it would be formatted on its own.
Foreign Words in English Text
When you use a foreign word or phrase in an English sentence, MLA style calls for italics. Writing about a German concept of Zeitgeist or a French joie de vivre in your prose means italicizing those terms. This signals to the reader that the word comes from another language.
There are several exceptions worth knowing. Foreign words that have become common in English through frequent use don’t need italics. Words like “café,” “résumé,” and “cliché” have been absorbed into everyday English and should be written in regular type. Proper nouns in other languages (names of treaties, organizations, people) are not italicized either. And if you’re quoting an entire passage in another language, you place it in quotation marks like any other quote rather than italicizing it. Julius Caesar’s famous “Veni, vidi, vici” would appear in quotation marks, not italics.
Non-English titles follow the same title rules as English ones. A French poem published within a larger collection gets quotation marks, not italics, just as an English poem would.
Emphasis and Words as Words
MLA allows italics for emphasis in your own prose, but sparingly. If you need to stress a particular word in a sentence, italicizing it is acceptable. Overusing this technique weakens its effect and makes your writing look cluttered, so save it for moments where the emphasis genuinely changes the meaning of the sentence.
You also italicize a word when you’re referring to it as a word rather than using it for its meaning. For example: “The word freedom appears fourteen times in the speech.” Here, freedom is italicized because you’re discussing the word itself, not the concept it represents.
When Underlining Replaces Italics
In handwritten documents, underlining substitutes for italics. If you’re writing an exam by hand or submitting a handwritten draft, underline any title or word that would be italicized in a typed paper. The two are functionally equivalent in MLA, but in any typed or digitally submitted work, always use italics over underlining.