"grown-up" or "grownup".

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Mars80
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"grown-up" or "grownup".

Postby Mars80 » 2015-11-13, 23:16

Which is the correct spelling of the word? With or without the hyphen? According to dictionary.com, the hyphen is required in the adjective but optional in the noun http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/grownup?s=t. According to some other dictionaries, however, the hyphen is required in both the adjective and the noun.

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Re: "grown-up" or "grownup".

Postby linguoboy » 2015-11-14, 1:56

Well, then, clearly there's variation.
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Re: "grown-up" or "grownup".

Postby Osias » 2015-11-14, 2:34

I think "grown-up" should mean a person that grew sideways too. Because is a wider word. :silly:
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Re: "grown-up" or "grownup".

Postby dEhiN » 2015-11-14, 4:27

I think this happens frequently in English:

1) A new word is created using one of the ways of word creation - add a hyphen between two separate words to join them together - frequently found in new nouns
2) Over time as the word becomes more common, perhaps due to laziness (which is what I believe), the hyphen starts to get dropped. This can happen where the two originally separate words then become appended to form one continous word, or the two become separated again with a space but now form a noun phrase. For a time both forms coexist in the orthography - with and without the hyphen.
3) Sometimes the original hyphenated form gets slowly replaced completely by the non-hyphenated form.
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Re: "grown-up" or "grownup".

Postby linguoboy » 2015-11-14, 5:05

dEhiN wrote:2) Over time as the word becomes more common, perhaps due to laziness (which is what I believe), the hyphen starts to get dropped.

I hate the explanation "due to laziness", because it doesn't really explain anything, it only serves to cast aspersions.

I think it's more a matter of familiarity. Some of these compounds can look quite odd when written together, e.g. slipup. They can also be somewhat ambiguous according to the rules of English pronunciation. (Shouldn't that i be long before a single medial consonant?) The hyphen solves these problems. But as we get more and more used to seeing these compounds, we eventually reach a point where dropping the hyphen no longer impedes comprehension, and then we entre a period of alternation. The other day, for instance, I was about to write "set-up" when I realised "setup" looked just as natural to me, so I used that instead.
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Re: "grown-up" or "grownup".

Postby dEhiN » 2015-11-14, 5:46

linguoboy wrote:
dEhiN wrote:2) Over time as the word becomes more common, perhaps due to laziness (which is what I believe), the hyphen starts to get dropped.

I hate the explanation "due to laziness", because it doesn't really explain anything, it only serves to cast aspersions.

I think it's more a matter of familiarity. Some of these compounds can look quite odd when written together, e.g. slipup. They can also be somewhat ambiguous according to the rules of English pronunciation. (Shouldn't that i be long before a single medial consonant?) The hyphen solves these problems. But as we get more and more used to seeing these compounds, we eventually reach a point where dropping the hyphen no longer impedes comprehension, and then we entre a period of alternation. The other day, for instance, I was about to write "set-up" when I realised "setup" looked just as natural to me, so I used that instead.

I guess when I wrote "laziness" I was envisioning the reason due to simple "it's one less character to write". I never considered your reasoning before. I suppose it's similar to the phonological phenomenon of intervocalic voiceless stops becoming voiced. I used to call that laziness as well because I saw it as being driven by a desire to spend a little less effort or energy - you don't have to adjust the vocal chords, just the tongue/mouth. But from a different perspective, that is conservation of energy and can be a smart thing, as opposed to a lazy thing.
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Re: "grown-up" or "grownup".

Postby Osias » 2015-11-14, 9:13

Image
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Re: "grown-up" or "grownup".

Postby Mars80 » 2015-11-15, 1:06

In the comedy film called "grown ups" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grown_Ups_(film) they write it as two separate words with no hyphen.


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