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The hyphen is dead

Long live the compound noun!

Well I might be exaggerating a bit, but in to the sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary hyphens have been removed from around of 16,000 words, many of them two-word compound nouns.

For example:-

Fig leaf
Hobby horse
Ice cream!
Pin money
Pot belly
Test tube

Others have become one word:-

Bumblebee
Chickpea
Crybaby
Leapfrog
Logjam

One word that is causing a bit of a problem is the word e-mail. To hyphenate or not to hyphenate, that is the question. But at the risk of looking old-fashioned I will continue to write e-mail. That way I can avoid the confusion with the German / French word email, which means enamel.

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