Short Oxford Dic breaks 16,000 hyphens.

[TheAnswer]

From Reuters:

LONDON (Reuters) - About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.

And if you've got a problem, don't be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby).

The hyphen has been squeezed as informal ways of communicating, honed in text messages and emails, spread on Web sites and seep into newspapers and books.

"People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not really sure what they are for," said Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED, the sixth edition of which was published this week.

Another factor in the hyphen's demise is designers' distaste for its ungainly horizontal bulk between words.

"Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography," he said. "The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."

The team that compiled the Shorter OED, a two-volume tome despite its name, only committed the grammatical amputations after exhaustive research.

"The whole process of changing the spelling of words in the dictionary is all based on our analysis of evidence of language, it's not just what we think looks better," Stevenson said.

Researchers examined a corpus of more than 2 billion words, consisting of full sentences that appeared in newspapers, books, Web sites and blogs from 2000 onwards.

For the most part, the dictionary dropped hyphens from compound nouns, which were unified in a single word (e.g. pigeonhole) or split into two (e.g. test tube).

But hyphens have not lost their place altogether. The Shorter OED editor commended their first-rate service rendered to English in the form of compound adjectives, much like the one in the middle of this sentence.

"There are places where a hyphen is necessary," Stevenson said. "Because you can certainly start to get real ambiguity."

Twenty-odd people came to the party, he said. Or was it twenty odd people?

Some of the 16,000 hyphenation changes in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, sixth edition:

Formerly hyphenated words split in two:

fig leaf, hobby horse, ice cream, pin money, pot belly, test tube, water bed

Formerly hyphenated words unified in one:

bumblebee, chickpea, crybaby, leapfrog, logjam, lowlife, pigeonhole, touchline, waterborne

I found the comment about typography and design effecting their decisions to be the most interesting. However, I wonder if that is just attempting to sugar-coat the fact that the general populous doesn't know when to properly use them.

Sadly, the article lacks a list of which words kept their hyphens intact.

 

[Abstract]

I use them all the time.

 

[Doctor Q]

"Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography," he said. "The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."

The team that compiled the Shorter OED, a two-volume tome despite its name, only committed the grammatical amputations after exhaustive research.

The Shorter OED editor commended their first-rate service rendered to English in the form of compound adjectives, much like the one in the middle of this sentence.

Twenty-odd people came to the party, he said.

However, I wonder if that is just attempting to sugar-coat the fact that the general populous doesn't know when to properly use them.

Oh my, look all those errors! Obviously, they meant to use the words designled, oldfashioned, twovolume, firstrate, Twentyodd, and sugarcoat.

 

[Blue Velvet]

Another factor in the hyphen's demise is designers' distaste for its ungainly horizontal bulk between words.

"Printed writing is very much design-led these days in adverts and Web sites, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography," he said. "The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned."

That might be so in display copy, but in continuous body text the line-breaking hyphen is (or should be) used judiciously to avoid ugly rags and rivers, my bête noire.

And judging by my clients, especially the younger ones, they don't know what a hyphen is for... nor do they know how a semi-colon should be used.

 

[skunk]

It seems to me that either you should make the hyphenated word into two words or leave the hyphen in, depending on whether the sense is still clear without the hyphen. "Bumblebee" is a silly example, because you don't get "workerbees" or "queenbees", do you? Joining up the words leads to the same ungainliness you find with German numerals.