"Untitled" Title

An "untitled" title with a titled subtitle.

"But the title IS Untitled. See? It's me being ever so clever."

— The Professor on Untitled Magic: The Gathering Podcast

Rather than a work truly having No Title, the work officially has a title that SAYS the work lacks a title. By definition, all examples of this DO have titles which are thus technically inaccurate.

Often this is done to evoke the "unprofessional" feel of a work with No Title while still having the convenience of being able to refer to the work by name. It is also common for these titles to start out as placeholders that were never changed to something else, either from a lack of time or because someone liked how the placeholder sounded. When it comes to artworks, "Untitled" is sometimes chosen as a title to leave the work's meaning to audience's interpretation. "Untitled" is the most common form, but any name for the work which says it lacks one counts.

Compare You Know the One, where a person or plot element is always referred to in a cryptic way to keep the information from the reader, and Speak of the Devil, where a character is never named because people fear the name.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• One chapter of Naruto is titled "Untitled," a reference to how Sai never gives names to any of his paintings.
• One of the final Monsters of the Week in SSSS.GRIDMAN is called "Anonymous" ("Nanashi", meaning "nameless", in Japanese). It's an incredibly half-assed Person in a Rubber Suit — at least initially — that its creator didn't even bother to name.

Film

• Cameron Crowe initially wanted to name Almost Famous "Untitled", after the style of an obscure record by a forgotten band. The studio forbade it until the Director's Cut, which was officially titled "Untitled: The Almost Famous Director's Cut."
• A Morey Amsterdam vehicle was called Don't Worry, We'll Think of a Title. Not directly saying the work lacked a title, but still implying it.
• Silverchair's contribution to the soundtrack of Godzilla (1998) has "Untitled" as the title.
• "Untitled Self-Portrait", Batman's song from The LEGO Movie.
• Deadpool 2 spent most of its marketing campaign calling the film "The Untitled Deadpool Sequel", after announcing the film was called "Deadpool 2".

Fanfiction

• The Harry Potter fanfic The Untitled Cheekquel Project.

Literature

• George Jean Nathan's A Book Without a Title.
• Raymond Smullyan's This Book Needs No Title.
• Mordkhe Spektor's A roman on a nomen (Yiddish for "A Novel without a Name").
• Pseudonymous Bosch's The Name of this Book is Secret.

Live-Action TV

• Alan Davies (of Jonathan Creek and QI fame) hosted a chat show on the British station Dave in the summer of 2014, called Alan Davies: as yet Untitled. He talks with four or five guests (mostly comedians), all seated round a table. At the end of the show, Alan and his guests have to come up with a title for that episode.
• Episode 10 of Monty Python's Flying Circus is named "Untitled," at least on the A&E video release.
• Episode 10.20 of Law & Order is called "Untitled." It concerns a murder at an art gallery, and "Untitled" is a standard "title" for paintings.

Music

Note: Any song or album intended to truly be untitled will be this by default (or sometimes, in the case of the latter, self-titled) when released digitally due to technical restrictions. Only add examples in which "Untitled", or variations thereof, is clearly supposed to be its name.

• invoked Simple Plan's "Untitled", often thought to be named "How Could This Happen to Me?". Because of this confusion, when it was released as a single, it was officially re-titled "Untitled (How Could This Happen to Me?)", making it a supposedly untitled song with two titles.
• Elton John's album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road has a track entitled "This Song Has No Title", which is a part of the chorus.
• Ten Years After named a track on their "Stonedhenge" album "No Title."
• The Smashing Pumpkins are another group who have a song that's officially listed as "Untitled" - it was a previously unreleased song that appeared on their Greatest Hits Album.
• A well-known Dutch singer was called the Zangeres Zonder Naam (Singer With No Name). That was her official name.
• The Benjamin Gate's debut album was named [Untitled].
• LL Cool J's Radio album has a track listed "Untitled", though it's actually just talking, not a song.
• The track "Untitled" on Mechanical Animals by Marilyn Manson.
• The Byrds' album (Untitled), which ended up being an example by mistake: The band were still trying to settle on a title when producer Terry Melcher was asked to fill out some documentation for the sessions and listed "(Untitled)" as a placeholder album title. Due to miscommunications, this ended up on the cover of the final release without the band knowing it.
• The hymn "For All the Saints" is typically sung to a melody called "Sine Nomine", composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The tune's name literally means "without a name" in Latin.
• They Might Be Giants have a track called "Untitled" on the EP of "(She Was A) Hotel Detective". It's a recording of a phone call accidentally left on the band's Dial-A-Song answering machine, in which the caller expresses her confusion over the existence of Dial-A-Song.
  • The track also turns up on the compilation Miscellaneous T with no title at all; it is sometimes called "13" because it is the 13th track on the compilation.
• Matthew Sweet's song "Untitled" works the word into the lyrics:
  Don't let me go on sad and unfinished
  Don't make mine a chord that is diminished
  Don't let me go on untitled
• Sigur Rós' third album contains eight untitled tracks and has the unpronounceable name ( ), which some have speculated to mean that the album itself is also untitled.
• Kendrick Lamar's album untitled unmastered. has eight untitled tracks.
• There is a German band called "Band ohne Namen" This translates to "A Band without a name"
• The band mewithoutYou has a 2018 album called [Untitled], with the square brackets and everything.
• Duke Ellington's Second Sacred Concert included a piece named "T.G.T.T.", which stood for "Too Good to Title".
• The Nas song "Untitled"; from an album that actually is untitled, incidentally.
• The Romany Rye's best known song is "Untitled (Love Song)", famously covered by Counting Crows.
• American Water have a song called "Formerly Untitled".
• David Bowie's The Buddha of Suburbia features a track named "Untitled No. 1", which is called that as an allusion to this trope's prevalence among fine art.
• Pelican has two examples. One album of theirs is simply called "Untitled - EP" and also the 4th track on their album The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon The Thaw has no title, represented by a simple dash mark.

Video Games

• An Untitled Story.
• The Nameless Mod.
• There was an old shooter game in the 1980s which was meant to be named Challenger. Then the Challenger shuttle disaster happened, and the game was hastily renamed to GWNN, i.e. "Game With No Name".
• The level "Hell Keep" (E3M1) in the game Doom has the music track "Untitled", possibly because "MIDI Version of Mouth for War" was too cumbersome and litigation-prone.
• In the horror adventure game Ib, there is a painting by this title in Guertena's Art Gallery.
• The Atari 2600 game Name This Game and Win $10,000, which is about a diver protecting treasure from an octopus; the publisher went bankrupt before the naming contest could be held. A later, unofficial naming contest gave it the name Going Under.
• The second expansion pack for Dungeons of Dredmor, "You Have To Name The Expansion Pack". You can in fact edit the title, and you get an achievement for doing so.
  Look, I'm a game developer!: Name the expansion pack.
• The Amstrad CPC/ZX Spectrum game Nonamed, set in a castle without a name.
• "The Untitled Game" mappack for Mari0.
• The Glider PRO Level Editor will name any newly created room "Untitled Room." The editor gives a count the number of rooms not renamed from this default when saving a house, which gives users an incentive to change every "Untitled Room" to something else, even border rooms that aren't meant to be accessible but may be partly visible in 9-room mode. (The default house "Slumberland" names such border rooms "Darling.") However, some playable rooms in well-known houses use silly variations on the default title, e.g. "Oh, these Untitled Rooms!" One of the many randomly titled sewer rooms in "Slumberland" is titled "This Room Has No Name."
• There's a Pokémon named "Type: Null", featured in Pokémon Sun and Moon, referring to the fact that it's artificially created to synthesise the strengths of various Pokémon. Once it "evolves" by breaking free of its restraints, it's given a proper name of Silvally.
• One of the songs from the Doom Game Mod Back to Saturn X is punningly named "Untilted".
• Untitled Goose Game, which is a Permanent Placeholder. It got the name Goose in development, but the creators thought it didn't have the same ring to it.
• Guybrush Threepwood from Monkey Island is an odd example. He was unnamed and just referred to as "guy" during production. Steve Purcell then named the file for his sprite "guybrush.bbm," because it was the "brush" file associated with the character. Eventually, people started referring to "Guy" as "Guybrush" and he stayed that way.

Webcomic

• El Goonish Shive had a series of storylines about the characters holding a party in the wake of "Sister 3". The early party setup was called "Title Pending", although Dan said in The Rant he'd give it a title later. Then the scenes directly before the party were "Title Pending 2 - Even More Pending". The first part of the actual party was "Title Pending 3 - Untitled Party" ("No, YOU'RE confusing!") and the part following the big cliffhanger event was "Title Pending 5 or 6" (because Dan thought the early parts were a bit long. He hasn't renumbered them, though). Given that the "Family Tree" arc was also initially titled "Title Pending", time will tell if this title sticks. The final page names the overall story as "Reflections", but the chapter list still uses the "Title Pending" names.
• Untitleds Project Series has a sock puppet who is named Untitled.

Web Original

• Tolarian Community College features a Magic: The Gathering podcast named Untitled Magic: The Gathering Podcast.
• Episode 9 of Inanimate Insanity Invitational is titled "Title TBD"—or "Title To Be Determined". This is also the title of the cartoon the Thinkers make for the challenge. The TBD in the title refers to the fact that the Bow in the show, who is a robot, doesn't just want to be a copy of the real Bow, and TBD is what Goo calls her after she tells him that she doesn't know what to call herself yet.
• Untitled Object Show
• Untitled Review Show, by Doug Walker.

Websites

• On Tumblr, the generic placeholder name for your blog is "untitled". Some users will keep the blog title either for aesthetic purposes or because they can't be bothered to change it.
• TV Tropes: The No Title article, which is about untitled works. It even has "Untitled" as an alternate name.
• A Google search for "Untitled Document" results in 61,400,000 results, indicating some degree of laziness on the part of Web authors in (not) creating content for the Title element of their pages.
• Wikipedia references this with TenPoundHammer's Law, which declares that any article on a forthcoming project whose name has yet to be determined (and thus has an "Untitled" Title for the article name, such as "[name of artist]'s [n]th album") is likely to be deleted.

Western Animation

• A ReBoot Western pastiche episode is called "The Episode With No Name" in reference to "The Man With No Name" in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
• Parodied in the Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode "Deleted Scenes", where Shake shows outtakes from a film he produced which is officially named "Untitled Master Shake Project".
• The Sonic Boom episode "Unnamed Episode" is about the townsfolk figuring out a name for their seemingly unnamed village.

Real Life

• During the French Revolution, and after a revolt, Marseille was renamed Ville-sans-Nom, or "Nameless Town".

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