The 'Comprised Of' Crusade

 

In honor of Bryan Henderson, the guy who went into Wikipedia and deleted 47,000 instances of the phrase comprised of, replacing them with composed of or other alternative wording, here’s a refresher about the difference between compose and comprise.

In their main definitions, comprise means to contain or include, while compose means to make up something. So our team comprises 20 players and those players compose the team. If that last one sounds a little odd it’s because compose is often used in the passive: The team is composed of 20 players.

You can see how this gets confusing. Compose and comprise are both standard when the whole thing (the team) is the subject of the sentence: The team comprises. The team is composed of. Pretty easy to combine the two in The team is comprised of.

In Chicago and AP style, that’s an error.  Comprised pretty much never lends itself to this passive formation is comprised of. In the real world, though, it’s allowed. Look up comprise in Merriam-Webster’s and you’ll see it is sometimes a synonym of compose. Merriam-Webster’s even cites the following as an example of its usage: “About 8 percent of our military forces are comprised of women.”

So if you think Henderson’s quest is a little, um, interesting -- I’m with you.

 

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