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I see various spellings of the same, which one is correct?

I have considered that the spelling might differ if it is British or American English, but as English isn't my native speak I have no clue.

tchrist
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siebz0r
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    I prefer one with hyphen. – Andy Semyonov Apr 02 '15 at 13:23
  • Who on earth upvotes such obviously inappropriate (for ELU) questions? – Edwin Ashworth Apr 02 '15 at 13:32
  • I agree with @AndySemyonov. The hyphen looks more organized to me, if that even makes any sense. – Mike Apr 02 '15 at 14:07
  • @EdwinAshworth Simply marking this question as a duplicate would have sufficed. I don't see why you placed that (inappropriate) comment. – siebz0r Apr 03 '15 at 05:42
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    This is not a duplicate. The other question refers to the general rule of "non" to which the answer was "one treats this on a case by case basis." This question is such a case. Please re-open. – Robino Aug 18 '16 at 09:10
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    @EdwinAshworth Care to share why it is inappropriate? The reason people can't see who votes is to protect the community against people who disagree with them from insulting them directly, as you are trying to do. – Robino Aug 18 '16 at 09:14
  • @Robino This question has now received 5 close-votes. I didn't even bother looking for possible duplicates; the lack of any evidence (from eg dictionaries) licensing various spellings where these are very easy to research makes this not a good question, as detailed in the Help Center. As the Wikipedia article on compound modifiers advises, 'Major style guides advise consulting a dictionary to determine whether a compound adjective should be hyphenated.' Upvoting such a question is trivialising the site, reducing its credibility. – Edwin Ashworth Aug 18 '16 at 11:07
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    ... As @tchrist has written, 'The tooltips on the up- and down-vote arrows on questions explicitly mention research effort. So that seems an officially endorsed (possible) reason for voting in either direction. Given that particular criterion, next to no [questions of certain types] ever show any research effort, and therefore merit downvotes based on that alone.' – Edwin Ashworth Aug 18 '16 at 11:22
  • Your anger made me tempted to +1 it, too. ;) There are good reasons to upvote a question, other than the amount of research it's demonstrated (which has little to do with the credibility of the answers). But this belongs to lengthy meta discussions. Here I only say that Google or Wikipedia get how the internet works, and those who hope to regulate against massive evolutionary forces with static help texts don't. The failure of the Yahoo! mindset (i.e. "we are in control"), has now been a historic case for "if you see strong trends you haven't set, you'd better adapt". SX is slowly cracking. – Sz. Jan 25 '18 at 00:19

2 Answers2

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For AmE, you should go to the best N. American dictionary, and use the version there:

nonexistent

adjective

\"+\

: not having existence

Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary

At COCA
CORPUS OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ENGLISH

NONEXISTENT 1727

NON-EXISTENT 443

thus there's a heavy use of both, but I'd follow the M-W U.

Marius Hancu
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BrE: Non-existent used to be British spelling, but a couple of years back they did away with the hyphens of 16,000 hyphenated words.

AmE: the answer above is the valid answer, just one word: nonexistent The American Heritage Dictionary 5th Ed. confirms this.

So it appears the Standard Usage in both side of the Atlantic is one unhyphenated word.

Abe
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