There’s an amusing cycle in English; sometimes a two-word phrase (for example, ice cream) for some reason acquires a hyphen for a while (ice-cream). Then the hyphen seems too fussy and troublesome, so it’s dropped completely and becomes a single compound word (icecream). After another while, the words separate again and the original two-word phrase is back in circulation (ice cream).
This has happened more often than you might think. “Lipstick”, for example, started out in the 1800s as “lip stick”, then in the 1920s became “lip-stick”, and finally today’s “lipstick.” This one hasn’t separated again (yet), but there are other examples that have completed the full cycle. “Fig leaf,” for example, has been “fig-leaf” and “figleaf,” and “fire drill,” “water bed,” “test tube,” and “pot belly” have gone full circle as well.
It may simply be that the hyphen itself falls in and out of fashion, linguistically speaking. At the moment it’s dropping in popularity — it’s more common right now to see “email” rather than “e-mail,” and “website” is beating out “web-site,” but these have changed just in the past few years. Another sign of the state of the hyphen can be found in dictionaries. The “Shorter Oxford English Dictionary” is revised more frequently than the big one (which is ten times longer), and the 2007 edition eliminated hyphens from sixteen thousand words!
Now, it’s also true that the OED, being a product of England, generally presents the British versions of words, and the hyphen has always been more popular in England than in the US. Clearly even the global seat of hyphenation is changing. But it will probably change again; if we say fare-well to the hyphen for now, it probably won’t be a final good-bye.
