Reuters is reporting that the new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has dropped the hyphens from over 16,000 words. The AskOxford Ask the Experts website even goes so far as to say that hyphen usage "doesn't really matter." Oxford reviewed over 2 billion words published after 2000 before making their decision. They noted a lack of use in journalism and online (formerly on-line). Casual writers expressed a lack of confidence in knowing when to use a hyphen, while professional writers and publishers avoid using hyphens because they are now considered ugly and old fashioned (formerly old-fashioned). Will you miss the hyphen? Check out some of the examples provided by Reuters:
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
via LISNews
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I don't see how this could have much of an impact on American spelling practices unless someone is teaching classes on British punctuation conventions or pursuing a profession in copyediting for an organization that uses the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as its style guide.
ReplyDeleteI think the entire point of the change is that in Britain, quaint spellings like "bumble-bee" are no longer the norm, so the dictionary is catching up. The more traditional practice of hyphenating modifiers (the two-year-old boy vs. the two year old) isn't affected, and most of the words on the sample list had already changed in American dictionaries.
This article reminds me of a line from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in which the narrator referred to "strangelooking ships." I always found that charming, even if I didn't agree with the lack of hyphenation.