Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on

Oops-- Reuters can't find your page anymore.

Maybe the page also perished along with thousands of hyphens as English marched on.

This should work: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070921/od_nm/britain_hyphen1_dc_1

Great, thanks.

OK-- I've got 'em memorized.

Thanks, Julielai. Over the years, I have got the impression that in countless cases it makes little difference whether you hyphenate an English word or not: tea-cup, teacup and tea cup are all used. When reading the article, I noticed that the writer still writes old-fashioned, not oldfashioned.

That's just great. Now we have to memorize which ones ended up as two words and which as one.

Thank you Julielai for the link.

It's one thing to drop hyphens from compound nouns, and quite another to drop them from compound adjectives. This can result in confusion (e.g., is he a Japanese art student or a Japanese-art student?). The question is whether you can drop the hyphen when the compound adjective doesn't precede a noun: e.g., "He's an old-fashioned man" vs. "He's old-fashioned/He's old fashioned." I think most wr

It's great! Thanks to give us this link, it's very interesting and useful.