LONDON (Reuters) – About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

“People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they’re not really sure what they are for,” said Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED, the sixth edition of which was published this week.

Source: Reuters.com

This really is a sign of the power and omnipresence of the Internet. People prefer shorter URLs, so they don’t type in hyphens and, as a result of that, they stop using hyphens offline, too. Lots of hyphenated domains just went down in value, I guess.

(via Owen’s Blog)