Hyphenation stage disappearing?

[Benjamin Barrett]

My client wanted to know today whether my "seed bank" should be changed to "seedbank" based on the Wikipedia article. Using a space still has the edge on Google, but it's a lost battle.

What is more interesting though, is that this might be a good illustration of the loss of the hyphenation stage. (Traditionally, it would be seed bank -> seed-bank -> seedbank.)

I bet a reason behind that loss is because the huge number of compounds that have been added to the lexicon have made compound concatenation more normal. Perhaps we'll even follow in the footsteps of the Germans some day....

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA

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