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Is Addenbrooke's site/ Addenbrooke's Site a proper noun or not?

I think the answer depends on the context. The title of the article is Addenbrooke's Hospital, supposedly a proper noun. For instance, would Addenbrooke's Site be a synonym for Addenbrooke's Hospital and would a synonym also be a proper noun?

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2 Answers

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While Addenbrooke is a proper noun, Addenbrooke's site is not; see previous answer. In the wikipedia page you link to, Site is capitalized when it appears in a title, The Addenbrooke's Site, but not when it appears in the sentence after the title:

In recent years, the Addenbrooke's site has almost become a self-contained town.

Edit: Whether Addenbrooke's Site or site is a proper noun is not made clear in the sources I've looked at. On the "No" side: The Addenbrooke's Hospital webpage does not refer to Addenbrooke's Site at all; its map page says "However, the Addenbrooke's site is very large and complex"; and Cambridge University's Addenbrooke's page has ten instances of site in lowercase, as for example "The site is rather large, but generally very accessible" and "Addenbrooke's is a smoke-free site..." On the "Yes" side: The Cambridge page has a main title Addenbrooke's Site and a note, "The information on this page is the responsibility of Addenbrooke's Site."

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The house standard on Wikipedia is to use sentence casing in section titles; from MOS:HEAD: "The provisions in Article titles (above) generally apply to section headings as well (for example, headings are in sentence case, not title case).". The current content of the Wikipedia article is inconsistent, hence the question. – Peter Mortensen Feb 9 '12 at 19:22
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@PeterMortensen - The links I added in Edit include Addenbrooke's telephone numbers you could call and ask. :) – jwpat7 Feb 10 '12 at 2:20
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If the name of the site is "Addenbrooke's Site", than it is a proper noun. If the site has some other name but it happens to be run by some person or organization called Addenbrooke, then that is not the proper name, but a description. (In which case the "s" in site would be small.)

That is, if Fred Stover opens a grocery store and calls it "Meat and Fish Mart", then "Meat and Fish Mart" is a proper noun, and "Stover's grocery store" is not a proper noun but a description. But if he calls it, "Stover's Grocery Store", then that is a proper noun which just happens to be descriptive.

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