Hello Everyone,
I’m reading Winged Warfare in World War I by Billy Bishop and noticed that he spells today with a hyphen, “to-day”. Was this a common spelling of the word in the early 20th Century and if so, when was the hyphen dropped?
I was curious so I went googling, The first hit was this SDMB thread:
The first reply in that thread went to this Online Etymology Dictionary link:
And that link says that it was written as two words until the 16th century, then was hyphenated until the early 20th century, and then was written as one word.
Ngram shows a crossover point around 1930: Google Ngram Viewer
That’s a surprisingly common process. Other examples: to-morrow --> tomorrow; Viet-Nam --> Vietnam.
Apparently the standard terms for the three ways of writing compound nouns are open form (to day), hyphenated form (to-day), and closed form (today):
Deleted
I believe that last is because one word is the way the post-war government spells it, and we’re only following their lead.
Many years a-go.
What a cool site!! Thanks for sharing.
I wish I had known about that yester-day! 