@brewsterkahle@mastodon.archive.org
2026-07-29 13:35 UTC
2/2
The crossover: 1925. In the Ngram data, "interlibrary loan" (closed) first overtakes "inter-library loan" (hyphenated) in frequency around 1925, and from that point forward it never looks back — closed spelling stays dominant continuously through the rest of the 20th century.
(summary by claude)
Replies (2)
-
@brewsterkahle@mastodon.archive.org 2026-07-29 13:42
...Other familiar words followed the same arc — lifestyle, boilerplate, doorbell, screwdriver, tailwind, rowboat, and postcard all had eras when they were encountered more commonly as open or hyphenated compounds.
-
@RoyBrander@urbanists.social 2026-07-29 15:07
@brewsterkahle@mastodon.archive.org There was no use for it, before computers began regarding the space character as special, dividing "communication tokens" (words). That created a need to have your favourite term become a single token that can't be mistaken for two words. By a computer.