Sunday, June 28, 2015

hyphenation - How can you determine whether a word with the pseudo- prefix should be hyphenated?

I am in a bit of a quandary over conflicting results in dictionary entries about the inclusion of a hyphen in some of the words containing the pseudo- prefix.




An example of one of these words is pseudoscience/pseudo-science.



The Oxford dictionary's entry omits the hyphen for the word (i.e. they spell it as 'pseudoscience').



Meanwhile, Cambridge's dictionary entry decides to place a hyphen between the prefix and 'science' (i.e. they spell it as 'pseudo-science').



Another example would be pseudo-intellectual/pseudointellectual. Oxford includes the hyphen; Dictionary.com does not.



I usually check more than one dictionary to see if a word with this prefix should be hyphenated or not. However, I am not sure which form to use in this case. Is there a way of determining which one?




Any help is much appreciated.

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