Wedding invitation wording, with ten examples you can copy

The host line is the first line of the invitation and the one couples rewrite most. It answers a single question — who is inviting these guests — and the answer is normally whoever is paying for the day.

One set of parents. Name them the way they are addressed in life. Formally that is “Mr and Mrs Edward Whitfield”; a softer version is “Helena and Edward Whitfield”; a mother hosting alone is “Mrs Helena Whitfield” or “Helena Whitfield”. Their child is then introduced as “their daughter Charlotte Anne” with no surname, because the surname is already above.

Both families. Two lines, joined by one “and”, the bride’s parents traditionally first, and the couple introduced as “their children”. If one family is contributing far more than the other and you would rather not rank them, skip the whole question with “Together with their families”.

The couple hosting. Open with your own names, or with “Together with their families” and then your names. It is the host line that survives every complication below: it names no household, ranks nobody, and still sounds generous.

Divorced parents. Each household takes its own line, and they are never joined by “and”, which would read as a marriage. The mother’s line goes first. A remarried parent appears with their spouse on one line. Because more than one household is speaking, the couple are given full names rather than “their daughter” — example five shows the whole shape.

A parent who has died. They cannot host, so they move out of the host line and into a line of parentage: “daughter of Mrs Helena Whitfield and of the late Mr Edward Whitfield”. Example six is the full wording.

Stepparents, grandparents, godparents, anyone else. The same rule applies to all of them: a host line names the people doing the inviting, in the form they are called in life, one household per line. Everyone else who matters can be named in the ceremony, in a thank-you line on the wedding website, or in the toast.

A host line in another tradition. Some traditions word this line to a different pattern rather than a variation on the one above. A Chinese card is issued by the parents and states birth order — eldest son, second daughter — which an English host line has no way to carry, and it is headed by the double happiness character rather than by a name. Chinese wedding invitation wording sets out that form, the two banquet times and the lunar date, with eight wordings in English and Chinese.

One last decision: titles. “Mr and Mrs Edward Whitfield” is the traditional form and it puts one name on the invitation for two people. “Mr and Mrs Edward and Helena Whitfield” keeps both. Ask the hosts which they want rather than choosing for them — it is their line, and it is the only part of the invitation that is about them.

British weddings often split the guest list in two. Day guests come to the ceremony and the wedding breakfast; evening guests arrive after the meal for the drinks, the cake and the dancing. It is a normal, practical convention — a church and a sit-down meal have a capacity, a dance floor does not — and it lands perfectly well, as long as the invitation does not draw attention to it.

Three rules make it land well. Send both invitations at the same time, so nobody hears about the wedding from somebody else first. Use the same design for both, so the evening invitation never looks like the cheap version. And never explain the split on the invitation itself — no “due to limited numbers”, no apology. The evening invitation should read as an invitation to a party, because that is what it is.

These two are numbered nine and ten, carrying on from the eight above, so you can refer to them the same way.

One practical note on timing. Evening guests need a start time and an end time far more than day guests do, because they are planning an arrival rather than a whole day. Give both, as example ten does, and give the reply deadline — the caterer still counts evening food.

These are the ones that come back after printing, when it is expensive to fix and too late to argue about.

• Mixing formal and informal in one card — "The twelfth of June at half past three" next to "Glenhurst Manor, 3:30pm" reads as two people wrote it. Choose a register on the first line and hold it to the last.
• Putting registry information in the invitation wording — Etiquette is firm about this one. A registry belongs on your wedding website or in the message you send with the link, never in the wording itself.
• Writing "no children" on the invitation — State who is invited instead of who is not: address the invitation to the named guests, and let the reply step confirm the numbers.
• Leaving out the year — Obvious to you, not to a guest booking flights in November. A wedding invitation always carries the year.
• Forgetting the end time — Evening guests especially need to know when the night ends, and so does whoever is driving them home.
• An RSVP deadline with no method, or a method with no deadline — One deadline, one way to answer. Two ways to answer means two lists to reconcile at midnight.
• Ambiguous times — "7" is not a time on a wedding invitation. Write "7:00pm", or "seven o'clock in the evening" if the rest is formal.
• Joining divorced parents with "and" — It reads as a couple. Separate lines, mother's household first.

The last mistake is one of timing rather than wording: finishing the wording so late that the invitations go out behind schedule. Six to eight weeks before the day is the normal window, and longer if guests are travelling — when to send wedding invitations sets out the dates, including the save-the-date and the reply deadline.