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voluntary blot in bareoff against enemy on bar - BAREOFF

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Friday, 29 January 2010, at 3:26 p.m.

In Response To: voluntary blot in bareoff against enemy on bar - BAREOFF (Gregg Cattanach)

Gregg Cattanach asked:

(Should 'acepoint', 'midpoint', 'barpoint' be one word or two?)

As Strunk & White says, there is a tendency in the English language for compound words to evolve from two words to hyphenated words to single words (with the hyphenation stage tending to be more stable in the U.K. than in the U.S.), provided the single word does not suffer from readability problems. For example: "wild life" -> "wild-life" -> "wildlife" and "humming bird" -> "humming-bird" -> "hummingbird."

The backgammon terms that Gregg asks about, as well as the term "bearoff," might be debatable today, but my prediction is that sooner or later they will all become single words (provided that people continue to write actively about backgammon, of course).

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