Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on

clipped from www.reuters.com About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly. And if you've got a problem, don't be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby) Researchers examined a corpus of more than 2 billion words, consisting of full sentences that appeared in newspapers, books, Web sites and blogs from 2000 onwards. For the most part, the dictionary dropped hyphens from compound nouns, which were unified in a single word (e.g. pigeonhole) or split into two (e.g. test tube) Formerly hyphenated words split in two: fig leaf hobby horse ice cream pin money pot belly test tube water bed Formerly hyphenated words unified in one: bumblebee chickpea crybaby leapfrog logjam lowlife pigeonhole touchline waterborne