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Names of vehicles

The names of specific ships, spacecraft, trains and other vehicles or craft are usually italicised. You also italicise the name of a class of vehicles. For instance:

The Nimitz class aircraft carriers are over 300 metres long.

This sentence is describing a particular class or group of carriers known as Nimitz carriers. We therefore italicise the class name.

Often, ship names have a tag at the beginning identifying what country owns it; for example, these famous battleships:

USS Missouri

HMS Hood

Notice how we only italicise the name of the ship itself, not the abbreviation before it. USS stands for ‘United States Ship’ and HMS stands for ‘Her Majesty’s Ship’.

Names of vehicles