1037: Compounds: One Word or Two? Oct 11, 2017

Is there a reason that 'bookcase' 'bookmark', 'bookshelf', and 'bookstore' are all written as one word, but other terms like 'book publisher' or 'book writer' are spelt standardly as two words, marked with a space?—not really. It might not seem important whether there is a space or not—after all, all spelling-conventions are arbitrary—and people do not speak with breaks between words anyway, so the separation of words would not change pronunciation. Nevertheless, these standards change the way that people think about language; orthography affects the way that people interpret a so-called standard variety of a language, so even though syntactically speaking 'book writer' is a compound word (and could be spelt as 'bookwriter' or 'book-writer' instead), it is perceived as two, while other ones, even occupational words relating to books, are written without a space standardly, like 'bookseller'. For more on the controversial issue of determining what makes a word, see Word Facts' 3-part series on the topic, click here.