A simple way to name a work is to put basic information about it in the title. The information can be the work's genre, target audience, medium, author, length, or just an affirmation that the work tells a story/tale/saga/whatever. While it's sometimes used to signal that a work is Meta Fiction and/or to make the title of a parody sound bland and uninspired, it's also a nice way to let the audience know what they can expect from the work. Unless you're a Trolling Creator who's trying to mislead the audience, of course. Adaptations in a different medium can also render such a title inaccurate.
Alternatively, the information in a work title belongs to a different work — usually a plot-important Show Within a Show, but it could also be a random song that's forgotten immediately after it's played once in Episode 2. Sometimes, nothing resembling the work described in the title appears at all, which may lead to fans speculating about what the title is supposed to refer to, and whether it's supposed to be interpreted literally or metaphorically. In this case, the title may fall under Never Trust a Title, but it still fits this trope.
Both types are common in fantasy, as a fantasy title may contain words like "Song" or "Tale". Heavy Meta songs often have the discussed genre in their titles. Also fairly common for Simulation Games, which may have "Simulator" or just "Sim" in the title. A Greatest Hits Album may have "Greatest Hits" or something similar in its title.
Very common in Light Novels, which often have extremely long titles that serve to summarise the plot or at least the premise. This trend partly started because a lot of them began life as Web Serial Novels on the hosting website Shousetsuka ni Narou, and in order to get the reader's attention and draw in the crowd it's written for among thousands of other works, the title has to double as a blurb.
Reference works like dictionaries tend to have really straight-forward titles like "Fast Eddie's Dictionary" because such works don't need to use creative titles to catch the attention of buyers — if you're looking for a dictionary, a book with "Dictionary" in the title is a natural choice, and if you're not in need of one, a cool title won't convince you to buy one anyway. Similarly, wikis almost always have "Wiki" in their names. Such examples are pretty uninteresting, so please don't fill the Literature and Web Original sections with them.
- Annual Title: When the title has the work's year of release.
- Ballad of X (while the works are not necessarily actual ballads, they fall under this trope either way)
- The Case of...
- The Eponymous Show
- In Case You Forgot Who Wrote It
- The Legend of X
- Running Time in the Title
- The Something Song
- Something Blues
- Super Title 64 Advance
- The Talk Show with Host Name
- The Title Saga
- Title: The Adaptation
Compare Brand X, A Dog Named "Dog" and [Trope Name]. Can overlap with Exactly What It Says on the Tin and Shaped Like Itself, and in extreme cases Captain Obvious.
Note: If a title contains a word that can refer to both a genre and something else, please make sure it's actually referring to the genre. A movie titled "Romantic Comedy" or "Love Movie" is an example. A movie titled "Romance of Alice and Bob" probably isn't.
Examples where the title describes the work itself (or the original work if it's an adaptation):
- Monogatari Series. "Monogatari" means "story" in Japanese.
- My Love Story!!
- Umi Monogatari
- Neighborhood Story
- The Story of Saiunkoku
- Genji Monogatari Sennenki
- The Story of Cinderella
- Yamada Taro Monogatari
- Minamoto-kun Monogatari
- Tenchi Muyo: War on Geminar, also known as Isekai No Seikishi Monogatari
- Binbou Shimai Monogatari
- Aka Akatoretachi no Monogatari
- Andersen Monogatari
- Manga de Hakken! Tamagotchi - Translates to "Found in the Manga! Tamagotchi". This title says that the Tamagotchi characters can be found in the manga.
- Azumanga Daioh - A manga by Kiyohiko Azuma, originally printed in Dengeki Daioh magazine.
- Bread Barbershop - It's about a slice of bread who runs a barbershop.
- Several Seltzer and Friedberg parody movies are named after the genre they parody:
- Date Movie
- Disaster Movie
- Epic Movie
- Scary Movie and its Numbered Sequels (though they only were involved with the first one)
- A Chinese Ghost Story
- A Christmas Story
- The Chronicles of Riddick
- The Jungle Book (2016)
- A Knight's Tale
- Love Story
- Not Another Teen Movie
- The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The "Horror" part might seem non-indicative, but "Rocky Horror" is the name of the creature in this picture show.
- Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
- Solo: A Star Wars Story
- Superhero Movie
- The Worst Movie Ever!
- The Autobiography of X is a popular format for autobiographies, in particular those of people important to American history:
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
- The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.
- The Autobiography of Malcolm X
- Autobiography of Red
- The Ballad of Mulan, Chinese ballad.
- The Book of the Duchess
- The Canterbury Tales
- Cathy's Book
- A Christmas Carol. Its full title is A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost-Story of Christmas.
- From the Black Widowers:
- The Dangerous Book For Boys by Conn Igulden
- The Daring Book for Girls by Miriam Peskowitz
- Diary of a Wimpy Kid
- The Diary of a Young Girl
- The Divine Comedy
- Dork Diaries
- The Epic of Gilgamesh
- The Jungle Book and its sequel The Second Jungle Book. Movie adaptations tend to keep the "book" part of the title.
- Latawnya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say "No" to Drugs: There's a horse named Latawnya. She's naughty, and she learns to say "no" to drugs. What more do you want?
- My Youth Romantic Comedy Is Wrong, as I Expected (a.k.a. My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU)
- Ravensong - A Novel
- The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- The Song of Roland
- The Tale of the Five series
- Tales from the Flat Earth series
- Tales of the City series
- Tales of the Fox series
- Tell Me a Story: Science Fiction One by Paul Williams
- Two-Minute Mysteries
- The experimental albums of John Lennon and Yoko Ono:
- Very common in Classical Music, at least up until the Romantic era. Composers would title their works with simple descriptive statements of the genre and the order in which it was composed, and sometimes the key, such as "Symphony No. 9" or "String Quartet No. 18 in A Major." Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, and Ludwig van Beethoven are famous examples, as can be seen in the list of Beethoven's compositions
, but it was common practice of the era.
- The Wedding Album by Duran Duran, which is their second self-titled album.
- The Self-Titled Album by The Beatles is usually referred to as The White Album for its blank white cover. Likewise, the band's first two Greatest Hits Albums, which were also self-titled, are colloquially referred to as The Red Album and The Blue Album after the color of the borders.
- Their song "The Ballad of John and Yoko" describes the couple's activities through the first half of 1969, including their wedding and honeymoon.
- Metallica's self-titled album is similarly known colloquially as "The Black Album" after its prominently black packaging.
- Music CDs from Touhou Project:
- Touhou – ZUN's Music Collection. Within the collection, there's the album Retrospective 53 minutes, which has its length in the title.
- The Akyu's Untouched Score series, which contains the soundtracks of the PC-98 games.
- The CDs with the fighting game soundtracks have names like "Collection of Illusionary Music".
- "Heavy Metal" by Judas Priest is a heavy metal song about heavy metal.
- The "Weird Al" Yankovic song "(This Song's Just) Six Words Long".
- NOW That's What I Call Music!
- The Audition have an album literally titled Self-titled Album.
- ZUN's Strange Works
- Howlin' Wolf's debut studio album was given the blunt title The Howlin' Wolf Album.
- Yes's third album is called The Yes Album, not to be confused with their self-titled debut album.
- The Bible. Its name comes from a Koine Greek phrase meaning "the books". Most books within the Bible are formally referred to as "Book of ___", "Gospel According to ___" or "Epistle to ___".
- The Book of Mormon
- The Farndale Avenue Housing Estate Townswomen's Guild Dramatic Society's Production of Macbeth, and several of its sequels (... Production of A Christmas Carol, ... Production of The Mikado, and ... Murder Mystery).
- An In-Universe example in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream: the plays ready to be performed for Theseus all feature these, perhaps poking fun at some of the elaborately long titles many printed texts of the day had. The plays include:
- "The battle with the Centaurs sung by an Athenian eunuch to the harp"
- "The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals, tearing the Thracian singer in their rage"
- "The thrice three Muses mourning for the death of Learning, late deceased in beggary"
- And of course the one that actually gets picked: "A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisbe; very tragical mirth" which is commonly shortened to just "Pyramus and Thisbe."
- Various Simulation Games by Excalibur Publishing have "Simulator" in the title, e.g.
- Action 52: 52 "Action" games in one.
- Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator
- Digital Combat Simulator
- Cultist Simulator and various other .
- Epic! The Humorous RPG
- Farming Simulator
- Goat Simulator
- Job Simulator
- Microsoft Flight Simulator
- Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale
- Two of the songs in Rhythm Doctor:
- "Oriental Techno"
- "Oriental Insomniac"
- SimAnt
- SimCity
- SimCity (2013)
- SimEarth
- Sim Farm
- SimTower
- Space Simulator
- Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People
- Surgeon Simulator 2013
- 10 Minute Space Strategy
- Touhou Project.
- Yandere Simulator
- The Doghouse Diaries
- Vegan Artbook. The comics have been published in books.
- Parodied in-universe in Homestuck. According to Karkat, trolls have created so many movies that the only original titles left are the ones that describe every event in the movie, and take up the entirety of the movie poster.
Examples where the title decribes something else than the work itself:
- In Future Diary, the main characters have diaries that can predict the future.
- High School Musical, which is about high school students trying to get the lead parts in their high school musical. Fittingly, HSM itself is a musical.
- Teen Beach Movie, whose title describes the film-within-a-film the characters get sucked into.
- Zack and Miri Make a Porno. It's about exactly what the title suggests.
- "Love You Like a Love Song" by Selena Gomez is about a person who's just like a catchy love song which gets stuck in your head.
- The Book of Mormon. It pokes fun at organized religion, and is not an adaptation of the actual religious text.
- Yume Nikki. The title means "dream diary", and refers to the protagonist's diary.
- The Angry Video Game Nerd is about a Caustic Critic bashing various old video games.
