{"id":362,"date":"2007-10-01T03:00:14","date_gmt":"2007-10-01T11:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/01\/disappearing-hyphens\/"},"modified":"2007-10-01T03:01:12","modified_gmt":"2007-10-01T11:01:12","slug":"disappearing-hyphens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/language\/editing\/disappearing-hyphens\/","title":{"rendered":"Disappearing hyphens?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since a big deal is being made about supposedly disappearing hyphens<\/a>, let’s apply a little perspective to the discussion.<\/p>\n

The first thing to realize is that the furor is the result of a promotional campaign for a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary<\/a>; the sixth edition has omitted 16,000 hyphens that were included in the previous edition. The popular press has blamed e-mail for this<\/a>, but the trend toward reduced hyphenation has actually been going on since at least the middle of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n

What makes this a nonstory for me — besides the “who cares” aspect — is the source. If you are using the Oxford English Dictionary<\/em> as a guide to spelling, all I can say is, stop now.<\/em> The OED has no equal as an etymological and historical dictionary of English usage. But as a guide to spelling it has always been decades behind the times, and that’s exactly what we’re dealing with here. The sixth edition of the Shorter is playing catch-up with other dictionaries, and now is hardly the time to make a fuss about hyphens that perished half a century ago.<\/p>\n

Check out these examples — not chosen by me but just picked up from the press reports<\/a> — of words that according to SOED6 have changed from being hypenated to being spelled open or closed:<\/p>\n