I've done a fair amount of research (like here), but I can't find any examples of hyphen rules with "auto". Microsoft Word doesn't take "autopopulate", but will accept either auto-populate or auto populate.
What I read about prefixes is that they shouldn't be hyphenated, but MS Word disagrees with this one. Unless auto isn't really a prefix at all, but I do take it to be.
Right now I'm thinking that auto doesn't usually work by itself unless you're talking about a car.
Does anybody have any authoritative word or grammatical insight?
Answer
Whether or not prefixes are hyphenated depends a lot on which prefix it is. In general, newly coined prefixes or neologisms are likely to take a hyphen, while established vocabulary tends to lose the hyphen. There are no absolute rules, though.
That being said:
- autopopulate is probably wrong, since the use of the prefix auto- in this sense is very recent.
- auto populate is also wrong, since verbal compounds are never written separately
- auto-populate is probably the preferred answer
No comments:
Post a Comment