How to Cite a TED Talk in MLA & APA: Formats, Speeches & Examples

By MLA Generator Editorial Team · Updated July 7, 2026

A TED Talk is one performance living in several places at once, and the citation changes with the address. The same talk exists on ted.com, on the TED YouTube channel, and as a transcript — and in APA the author flips from the speaker to the uploading account depending on which one you used. Add the smaller traps — ted.com shows only a month and year, TEDx talks are not on ted.com at all, and timestamps replace page numbers when you quote — and it is no surprise this is one of the most-searched citation questions. The MLA Style Center and APA Style have both published TED-specific guidance, and this guide follows it exactly, with one real talk formatted side by side in all seven styles, plus the speech formats for talks that never went online.

The shortest answer: in MLA, the speaker is the author; the talk title goes in quotation marks; TED is the italicized container; then the posting date and the URL without https://. Cuddy, Amy. “Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are.” TED, June 2012, www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_may_shape_who_you_are. In-text: (Cuddy), or (Cuddy 00:02:12) for a moment. APA: Cuddy, A. (2012, June). Your body language may shape who you are [Video]. TED Conferences. Then the URL.

What counts as a TED Talk or speech

This page covers a recorded talk or speech you watched or listened to: a TED or TEDx talk on ted.com or YouTube, its transcript, and the live or historical speech formats in MLA and APA. The unit you cite is one talk at one address — the same talk on ted.com and on YouTube produces two different entries, and you cite the version you actually used.

Some nearby sources are better cited as something else:

• A TED talk you watched on YouTube follows the patterns below, which match the official YouTube video guidance — the container or author shifts to the platform and channel.
• A TED Radio Hour episode or TED Talks Daily audio is a podcast episode: different container, different format designator.
• A speaker’s book that grew out of a talk is a book. Cite the talk for what was said on stage and the book for what is on the page.
• A class lecture or campus talk you attended has its own formats — see how to cite a lecture.
• Something a speaker said to you directly — after the talk, by email — is a personal interview or communication, not a speech.

If it is a recorded talk at a TED or YouTube URL, or a speech you heard delivered, this page applies.

Information to collect before you cite

Open the talk’s page and copy:

• Speaker’s full name — the person on stage, not the TED editor who wrote the summary.
• Exact title — as shown on the talk’s page. MLA reproduces it in title case; APA converts it to sentence case.
• Where it lives — ted.com or YouTube. This single fact changes the author, date, and container in the entry.
• Date — ted.com shows only a month and year (“June 2012”); YouTube shows a full date. Use what the page gives you.
• Uploading channel — for YouTube versions: TED, TED-Ed, or TEDx Talks.
• URL — the talk page’s address. Skip share-shortened links.
• Timestamp — only if you will quote or paraphrase a specific moment.

The generator at / extracts the speaker, title, and date from a pasted TED Talk URL. Double-check the date field — the month-year date on ted.com is the detail existing tools most often mangle into a bare year.

One TED Talk, formatted in all seven styles

The talk below is the one APA Style uses in its own official TED Talk guidance (Publication Manual, 7th ed., Section 10.12), so the APA entry here is authoritative rather than constructed, and the MLA entry follows the MLA Style Center’s online-lecture format element for element.

The source: Amy Cuddy’s talk “Your Body Language May Shape Who You Are,” delivered at TEDGlobal in June 2012 — the only date the talk’s ted.com page shows. URL: https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_may_shape_who_you_are. Accessed July 4, 2026.

Two decisions separate the styles. The first is what the talk is. MLA treats it as a work on a website: title in quotation marks, TED as the italicized container. APA treats it as audiovisual media: title in sentence-case italics with the bracketed designator [Video], published by TED Conferences. Chicago’s current quick guide (CMOS 18, 2024) handles recorded talks with its online-multimedia pattern, and AMA-based medical guides format a talk delivered at a TED conference as a conference presentation; the rows above show the standard web-source treatment each style’s engine applies to a ted.com page.

The second is the date. Because ted.com shows only “June 2012,” MLA writes June 2012, APA writes (2012, June), and the year-only styles simply use 2012. None of them wants you to invent a day.

The in-text citation for the same talk, pointing at the moment 2 minutes 12 seconds in:

• MLA: (Cuddy) for the whole talk, (Cuddy 00:02:12) for the moment
• APA: (Cuddy, 2012) or narrative Cuddy (2012); quoting, (Cuddy, 2012, 2:12)
• Chicago author–date: (Cuddy 2012) — no comma between author and year
• Harvard: (Cuddy, 2012)
• Vancouver, AMA: (1) or superscript ¹ — put the timestamp in your prose, not the citation
• IEEE: [1] — same caveat

How to cite a TED Talk or speech in MLA

The MLA 9 works-cited template for a talk on ted.com:

Speaker’s Last Name, First Name. “Title of the Talk.” TED, Month Year, URL.

The MLA Style Center’s guidance, from its “How do I cite an online lecture or speech?” post: “List the name of the presenter, followed by the title of the lecture. Then list the name of the website as the title of the container, the date on which the lecture was posted, and the URL.” Its own example:

Allende, Isabel. “Tales of Passion.” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading, Jan. 2008, www.ted.com/talks/isabel_allende_tells_tales_of_passion/transcript?language=en.

One thing has changed since MLA published that example in 2018: the site no longer calls itself “TED: Ideas Worth Spreading.” MLA’s rule is to record the container name as the site presents it, so for a talk you cite today, the container is simply TED — as in the Cuddy entry in the table. The rest of the example still does its work: the speaker is the author, the title takes quotation marks and title case, the date is whatever the talk page shows, and the URL drops https://, as MLA URLs always do.

The in-text citation is the speaker’s surname, no page number: (Allende) or (Cuddy). For time-based media, MLA recommends adding a timestamp when it helps readers find the passage, in hours, minutes, and seconds: (Allende 00:02:12).

The three variants you are most likely to need:

Watched on YouTube, including TEDx. Following MLA’s YouTube guidance, the speaker stays as author, the container becomes YouTube, and the channel goes in the contributor element:

Shane, Janelle. “The Danger of AI Is Weirder Than You Think.” YouTube, uploaded by TED, 13 Nov. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhCzX0iLnOc.

For a TEDx talk, the contributor reads “uploaded by TEDx Talks” — TEDx events post there, not to ted.com.

You used the transcript. Cite the transcript page and add “Transcript.” as a supplemental element at the end, the same pattern MLA’s “How do I cite a copy of a speech?” post uses:

Allende, Isabel. “Tales of Passion.” TED, Jan. 2008, www.ted.com/talks/isabel_allende_tells_tales_of_passion/transcript?language=en. Transcript.

A speech you attended in person. MLA uses the venue format: speaker, title in quotation marks (or a plain-text description if untitled), the event, date, and location, with a final descriptor such as Keynote Address or Lecture:

Speaker’s Last Name, First Name. “Title of Speech.” Name of Conference or Event, Date, Venue, City. Keynote Address.

How to cite a TED Talk or speech in APA

The APA 7 reference template for a talk on ted.com, from APA Style’s “TED talk references” page:

Speaker, A. A. (Year, Month). Title of the talk in sentence case [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/xxxxx

The official example:

Cuddy, A. (2012, June). Your body language may shape who you are [Video]. TED Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_may_shape_who_you_are

The rules behind it: the speaker is the author; the date is the month and year, because that is all ted.com provides; the title is sentence case and italic, followed by the bracketed description [Video]; the publisher is TED Conferences; and the reference ends with the full URL — no period after it, ever.

Watched on YouTube, including TEDx. The uploading account becomes the author, “to aid in retrieval” in APA’s words — readers who follow the reference land on that channel. The speaker’s name survives inside the video’s title, and the date becomes the full upload date:

TED. (2019, November 13). The danger of AI is weirder than you think | Janelle Shane [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhCzX0iLnOc

For a TEDx talk, the author is TEDx Talks, the channel that hosts every TEDx event’s videos.

A recorded speech. APA’s official pattern for a speech hosted online uses a bracketed description that says what the recording is:

King, M. L., Jr. (1963, August 28). I have a dream [Speech audio recording]. American Rhetoric. https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm

If you used a transcript rather than the recording, the bracketed description changes to [Speech transcript]. And a live, unrecorded speech or lecture gets no reference entry at all: APA treats it as a personal communication, cited in-text only — (A. Cuddy, personal communication, June 26, 2012).

In-text: parenthetical (Cuddy, 2012) or narrative Cuddy (2012); the YouTube version cites its author the same way, (TED, 2019). For a direct quotation, a timestamp stands in for the page number, as in APA’s own example: “sweeping inferences and judgments from body language” (Cuddy, 2012, 2:12).

Edge cases

The same talk on ted.com and YouTube produces two different entries. This is the trap that catches the most students. In APA, the author flips from the speaker (Cuddy) to the uploading account (TED); in MLA, the container flips from TED to YouTube with an “uploaded by” contributor. Neither version is wrong — cite the one you watched, because your reader should land where you did.

ted.com only shows a month and year. That is not missing data; it is the date. MLA writes June 2012, APA writes (2012, June). Do not pad it to a full date from a press release or Wikipedia, and do not truncate it to a bare year when the month is right there on the page.

TEDx is not TED. TEDx events are independently organized under license, and their talks live on the TEDx Talks YouTube channel, not ted.com. Cite them as YouTube videos: author TEDx Talks in APA, “uploaded by TEDx Talks” in MLA. If a TEDx talk was promoted onto ted.com — it happens — cite the ted.com version with the standard ted.com formats.

You quoted a moment. Timestamps replace page numbers for video. APA’s official form is (Cuddy, 2012, 2:12) — minutes and seconds where the quotation begins. MLA recommends the fuller 00:02:12 form. For a long paraphrase, a range like 2:12-3:05 is fine in either style.

You read the transcript instead of watching. Cite what you used. MLA cites the transcript page’s URL and appends “Transcript.” as a supplemental element. APA changes the bracketed description to [Speech transcript] or cites the transcript of the audiovisual work. This matters because transcripts and captions occasionally diverge from what was said on stage — quoting the transcript while citing the video plants an error a careful reader can catch.

The speech was never recorded. A talk you attended with no published recording is cited from the event itself. MLA uses the venue format with a descriptor — Keynote Address, Lecture. APA is stricter: no recoverable source means no reference entry, so it becomes a personal communication, in-text only. If a recording or transcript exists anywhere public, cite that instead.

A historical speech. Cite the copy you used, not the podium. A speech republished in a book follows MLA’s copy-of-a-speech pattern — Goldman, Emma. “What Is Patriotism?” Great Speeches of the Twentieth Century, edited by Bob Blaisdell, Kindle ed., Dover Publications, 2011. — and a speech in an online archive cites the archive, with the delivery date after the title, as in MLA’s Eisenhower example. APA’s King reference above is the model on that side: delivery date as the date, hosting archive as the source.

Much of the advice online is stale. TED’s own blog post about citing talks predates APA 7 and no longer matches APA’s format. MLA’s official example still carries the site’s former name, “TED: Ideas Worth Spreading” — a tagline TED retired in 2024. Chicago moved to its 18th edition in 2024, and many library pages still show 17th-edition formats. When a page’s example conflicts with the current MLA 9 or APA 7 patterns above, trust the style body — MLA 9 and APA 7 are both still current in 2026.

A final principle: cite the version of the talk you actually watched — its speaker, its address, and the date its own page shows — and point readers at the moment you used with a timestamp. Every fork in the TED formats, ted.com versus YouTube versus transcript versus stage, is just that one rule applied to a talk that lives in several places at once.

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