We are not big fans of hyphenated words, so we were quite pleased to hear that the Oxford English Dictionary has dropped
16,000 hyphenated words. On the death list is "e-mail" which is now "email." We've been saying that for years, people.
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary announced this month that it has committed punctuational genocide, eliminating 16,000 hyphens from its pages. Either by combining two words into one or simply uncoupling them-severing the corpus callosum between them-editors of the dictionary's sixth edition have seen fit to knock hyphens from its pages like so many teeth from a hockey goaltender's mouth. So, ice-cream becomes ice cream and chick-pea chickpea.
But wait, how many of us were still hyphenating ice cream anyway? Does this announcement merely remove the fig-leaf (sorry, fig leaf) barely covering the fact that the Shorter OED was in major need of some long overdue updates? "The dictionary reflects the language as it's being used today," concedes Jesse Sheidlower, Editor at Large of the Oxford English Dictionary. "In general you'll find that most dictionary editors are extremely progressive. As with any change like this, there's some point at which you want to be a little conservative. You don't want to change an entry the second there is some change in the language." (The Shorter OED is essentially the OED without its supporting quotations and most obsolete words. It was last updated in 2002; the OED itself has been updated only in part and only online.)
This particular change suggests that British English, which the OED catalogs, is becoming increasingly Americanized. How many Limeys were running scared of bumble-bees in their gardens this summer? Sheidlower stresses that the changes were based on findings made combing through British, not American, published texts. "We would use the most formal, most edited evidence," he says. "We incorporate American evidence, but the dictionary is edited in England and does represent British standards."
