Hyphenated Words: Oxford English Dictionary Makes Changes

Lovers of the hyphen, look away now: it seems to be on the way out. Editors of the Oxford English Dictionary have removed something like 16,000 hyphens from the text, creating a new Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. According to the editors, “The Shorter” contains more than 600,000 definitions, covering the English language from the days of Milton and Shakespeare right up to the present day of blogs and hoodies. The dictionary covers one–third of the Oxford English Dictionary in just one–tenth of the size. It aims to include all words used in English since 1700, as well as everything in Shakespeare, the Authorized Version of the Bible, the poetry of Milton, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene. As a historical dictionary, it includes obsolete words if they are used by major authors and earlier meanings where they explain the development of a word. More than ten centuries of English are covered here, from the Old English period to the 21st century.”