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I (myself) prefer one but an editor I use redlines it as a misspelling, so which one should we use here?

Glorfindel
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Curious Cat
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    You don't need quora, only a dictionary https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/redshift – James K Jan 31 '24 at 05:50
  • @James K: Which one? Many spell it as 2 words, as does this editor and Quora's too, as does the European Space Agency/ESA. – Curious Cat Jan 31 '24 at 08:01
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    I think it's rather normal for the English language, when two nouns are combined to form a new noun, to start out separated, then hyphenated, and finally conjoined. In addition to "red shift → red-shift → redshift", examples include "light year → light-year → lightyear", and also "minutes of arc → arc minute → arc-minute → arcmin", I think. "Light-seconds" are still hyphenated though, perhaps because it's not as popular a word. – pela Jan 31 '24 at 11:33
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    It's your web browser that's doing the spell check, not Stack Exchange or Quora or the ESA website. – notovny Jan 31 '24 at 19:02
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    I think the question is OK. From time to time we have questions that ask to clarify certain items necessary to write or publish about Astronomy. See for example How is the star 'Spica' pronounced? and When we say a variable star is "fainting" does it mean something more or different than "dimming" or "fading"? At only 3.6 questions per day, it's not like we're so overwhelmed that we need to split hairs on topicality. After all, this has a well-defined, and it turns out interesting answer! – uhoh Feb 01 '24 at 07:22
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    And that answer is fact-based, so closing for "This question is likely to be answered with opinions rather than facts " seems pointless. voting to leave open – uhoh Feb 01 '24 at 07:25
  • I've rolled back the edits. Please don't use edit to ask more questions. If you want to know how to spell "Black hole" please use a dictionary. – James K Feb 01 '24 at 20:17
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    I’m voting to close this question because the spelling of a word is best answered with a dictionary. This is utterly trivial to answer. There is nothing "interesting" about it at all. – James K Feb 01 '24 at 20:19
  • Perhaps, as this asks "which spelling should be used here, this should be moved to meta. – James K Feb 01 '24 at 21:17

1 Answers1

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It’s a single word. Used to be double, but quickly became single.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/redshift

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/redshift

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/redshift_n?tab=factsheet#26403329

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=redshift%2C+red-shift&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 (I’d curious about the diminishing number of mentions of “redshift” since 2000—not that “red-shift” has increased during the same period, on the contrary)

ProfRob
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Pierre Paquette
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  • But then why does this editor and Quora's too redline it, as a misspelling? Wot, it's/they're out of date? – Curious Cat Jan 31 '24 at 07:57
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    Scientific terms very often get redlined by non-scientific spell checkers. I've also had spell checkers ping on "email" because they think it should have a hyphen. Language evolves and programs react slowly. – Darth Pseudonym Jan 31 '24 at 15:00