Talk:Landlord and Tenant Acts

Page name
At 09:16, 4 October 2011 user:James500 (talk) moved Landlord and Tenant Acts to Landlord and Tenant Act over redirect, stating: ''Plural makes it sound like it is a collective title. That cannot be true because it is used in more than one country.''

I do not understand the above rationale. Googlefight reports 1.22 million results for Landlord and Tenant Acts, compared to 0.47 million for Landlord and Tenant Act. I am therefore moving the page back. – Fayenatic (talk) 12:26, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Do you know what a statutory collective title is? The present page name seems to imply that the Acts listed on the page have some kind of relationship to each other, and, in particular, that they have a statutory collective title by which they can all be cited together, because it has the form that a collective title usually takes. James500 (talk) 14:30, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

And "Landlord and Tenant Acts" is certainly not a short title, as you wrote. None of the Acts listed on the page is called "The Landlord and Tenant Acts" (plural). That doesn't even make sense. "The Landlord and Tenant Act 1954", for example, is not called "the Landlord and Tenant Acts 1954". James500 (talk) 14:41, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Also, the expression "Landlord and Tenant Act" (singular) appears in the short title of each of these Acts, but "Landlord and Tenant Acts" (plural) may be a neologism. James500 (talk) 15:01, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Also, I do not understand the logic of using googlefight to determine a page name. What exactly does that prove? James500 (talk) 15:50, 4 October 2011 (UTC)


 * No; please give an explanation/citation for "statutory collective title" if it will help. It does sound as if that would be the proper way to describe the LTAs, rather than "short title".
 * The two examples of collective titles on the page Companies Act use the plural form "Companies Acts NNNN to NNNN".
 * The phrase "Landlord and Tenant Acts" is used by official bodies including ICO and the House of Lords (as court of final appeal), commercial experts such as Jones Lang LaSalle and LexisNexis (that one specifies certain years), and informal fora such as this one. The googlefight result, if it worked properly, indicates more search results for the plural phrase than the singular over the web as a whole; this may be relevant because of WP:COMMONNAME.  – Fayenatic (talk) 19:23, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

"Collective title" is an expression used, in particular, by the Short Titles Act 1896 for an expression by which two or more Acts of Parliament can by law be cited together in another Act of Parliament and for other purposes.

The only collective title that I have found so far ("The Landlord and Tenant Acts 1927 and 1954") only applies to two of the Acts listed in the article.

It is not always clear what the sources you listed mean when they refer to "the Landlord and Tenant Acts". It is not clear that they are using the expression in a consistent sense. "The Landlord and Tenants Acts 1985 and 1987" is not, as far as I can see, a collective title. It is an informal imitation of one. It is not so much that the expression is "wrong" (its meaning is obvious) as that it probably isn't worth mentioning it in the article because it has no legal status. (Wikipedia is not a dictionary or usage guide).

At the moment, the main function of this page is to provide an index of primary legislation with similar short titles (i.e. "The Landlord and Tenant Act YYYY"). I am not sure that WP:COMMONNAME is relevant to a list of this type.

Unless Googlefight can determine the sense in which an expression is used, I doubt that it can determine the "common name" of all of the Acts listed in the article, assuming that they have one. It is not necessarily the case that all of the Acts listed in the article are referred to collectively as "Landlord and Tenant Acts" by anyone, even though at least some of them seem to be. It is not plainly not the collective title of all of them. James500 (talk) 23:38, 6 October 2011 (UTC)