Guardian
Angles

Small print

• Every figure is a share of that year's headlines, so the Guardian's changing output volume doesn't skew the lines. Charts start at zero.
• A "colon" means a colon followed by a space — so 3:30pm doesn't count. A "quote opening" is a headline whose first character is a quotation mark.
• Closed live blogs are retitled "…as it happened", so that suffix — not the word "live" — is how the archive remembers live coverage.
• The current year is drawn hollow: it's the year so far, not the year.
• The "Counting" control re-counts the cards and the ledger within one section or tone. The first-name league and the facts always count everything.
• A few entries note where the Guardian's own style guide would raise an eyebrow. That's an affectionate aside, not a charge sheet — house style is a living thing, the guide changes its own mind, and a rule worth breaking gets broken. This is a record of how the headlines read, not a mark out of ten.
• "First person" means the headline contains "I", "my" or "me" as a whole word.
• First names are matched as whole words against a tracked list derived from the people the Guardian tags — so "Boris" is everyone called Boris, and John's eternal podium place owes a little to John Lewis (the shop). Ambiguous names (Jordan, Will, Bill, Amber…) aren't counted at all, and nor are Kim or Xi — surnames first, in the league's defence. The male/female split follows each name's dominant bearers in Guardian coverage.
• A column's byline — the "| Marina Hyde" that signs off an opinion headline — isn't counted. Otherwise the league would simply crown whoever writes most often, and Margaret would be our columnist Margaret Sullivan rather than Margaret Thatcher.
• And the word the Guardian famously won't use: Exclusive: opens — headlines out of —. Almost none of them recent.