The anniversary of a landmark Supreme Court case raised a question about how to use versus abbreviations the right way.
When you’re writing about conflicts that pit one party against another, the word versus will eventually come into play. But sometimes, it’s appropriate to shorten the already-short word. So in case you’re ever tempted to wonder whether you should use v. or vs., here’s a quick refresher on the two versus abbreviations.
America recently marked the 70th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a famous case. The ruling established that segregation in public schools is unconstitutional.
If you read the name of the case out loud, you might say “Brown versus the Board of Education.” (The full name of the defendant, which is rarely mentioned, is the Board of Education of Topeka. In that case, on May 17, 1954, Justice Earl Warren wrote that “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” as segregated schools are “inherently unequal.”
There’s an alternate way to read the name of the case, which I’ll get to in a moment.
Every fall, my alma mater, The University of South Carolina, plays its chief rival, Clemson University. The two have sparred in that football game for more than a century. In fact, they first faced off on Nov. 12, 1896. I won’t bother mentioning the win record for the schools because…well, it isn’t pretty for USC. Of course, I didn’t go to USC for football, so in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter that much.
But that gives you two very different kinds of conflicts in which you might use the word versus in describing them. When writing them out, though, you wouldn’t use the same abbreviation.
v. or vs.? How to pick the correct versus abbreviations
Most of the time, we abbreviate the word versus as vs. For people asked to pick a pet preference, it might be called “cats vs. dogs.” If you’re expecting a big check, you might have an internal debate about “saving vs. spending.”
The aforementioned battle between USC and Clemson is known as the Palmetto Bowl. If you visit its official site, you’ll see this:
CLEMSON vs. SOUTH CAROLINA
Personally, I’d be tempted to write it as “South Carolina vs. Clemson,” but it looks like they went alphabetical.
But remember that I mentioned that you use vs. in most cases! Legal cases are a bit different. When citing a case, like the one I started the post about, you’d only use v. So that famous case would be written this way:
BROWN v. THE BOARD OF EDUCATION
In some other countries, the V is written without the period. In the United States, the common standard adds the period after the V.
Court cases can also be read with the letter V spoken by itself instead of versus. So you could read the name of the case out loud as “Brown (vee) The Board of Education” with “vee” being the pronunciation of the letter V itself.
Why can’t court cases simply use vs. like every other occurrence of versus? Well, it’s a legal convention made long, long ago. You could go ask whoever came up with the idea why, but I’m sure they’ve long since departed this life…so you shouldn’t expect much of an answer.
