#Shorter oxford english dictionary bit how to
#Shorter oxford english dictionary bit update

The new SOED lists many hyphenless words such as leapfrog, bumblebee, crybaby, pigeonhole, lowlife, and upmarket, which will be a relief to those of us who have been spelling them like that all along (and all except lowlife are written without hyphens in the 2004 Concise Oxford anyway). It will be no surprise to learn that the SOED writes email, not e-mail, and website rather than Web site, since neither is new - they were so listed in the 11th edition of the Concise Oxford in 2004 (I’m old-fashioned in preferring the separated forms).

Americans have long been much more willing to write words such as postmodern without the hyphens that British standards require. A century ago, it was standard practice to write to-day, but the hyphen has long since evaporated from the page similarly with teenager ( teen-ager from its first use in 1941 until the later 1950s) and lipstick (it was two words in the 1880s, but became hyphenated around the 1920s). The hyphen is not the same as the dash - in typography, a dash is a form of parenthesis it was once also used to mark the omission of words or letters, perhaps because they were considered rude.Ĭompound nouns have traditionally begun as separate or hyphenated words but with a strong tendency over time to collapse into single words. The use of hyphens to fill out or justify lines of text of fixed length goes back to Gutenberg. Its name is from the Greek huphen, together, though the Greek hyphen was a half circle under the words to link them. The hyphen is seen as messy looking and old-fashioned.”Ī hyphen is a short dash specifically used to connect two words or to join syllables of a word that have been separated by the end of a line in printing.

#Shorter oxford english dictionary bit how to

“People aren’t confident about using hyphens any more they’re not really sure what they are for.” Because they are unsure how to use the punctuation mark, he says, “It’s now popping up in places where it was never used before, as in the ubiquitous ‘Time to top-up your mobile’.” He feels designers are a significant influence: “Printed writing is very much design-led these days, and people feel that hyphens mess up the look of a nice bit of typography. He suggests that it is being squeezed as informal ways of communicating - popularised through text messages and e-mails - become more common in newspapers and books. It seems that people just can’t be bothered with it.

It’s too early to assert this, though Angus Stevenson, the editor of the SOED, does say that “we’ve been finding the hyphen is used less and less” and five years ago the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary noted that even then the hyphen was being used only half as much as it had been 10 years earlier. Some reports have assumed that this means the end of the hyphen in all word compounds and even its demise as a punctuation mark. One matter has caused a lot of comment - the decision by its editors to omit the hyphen from some 16,000 words in the work.

#Shorter oxford english dictionary bit update

The five-yearly update of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (SOED) came out last week.