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I am trying to identify which usage is correct or most common in American English: lock picking, lockpicking, or lock-picking.

I found no results in Merriam-Webster online, and data from Google Ngram and Corpus was inconclusive. There is an international association, TOOOL, that treats the phrase as a single word, and the Wikipedia article on this subject actually formats the phrase in two different ways.

KDP
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    I don’t understand what you mean by “correct”. – tchrist Oct 29 '19 at 14:36
  • @tchrist - Agreed. All three forms are correct, though the last one is not much in use. I see more of "lock picking". – Justin Oct 29 '19 at 14:38
  • I think that one can reasonably conclude from the data afforded by Google Ngrams that (a) the open form is more commonly used than the closed (though the tool doesn't differentiate premodifier, pure noun, and predicative usages), though (b) favoured choice has changed over time, and (c) both open and closed forms are used.... – Edwin Ashworth Oct 29 '19 at 14:56
  • Assessing popularity of the hyphenated form is more difficult; Ngrams seemed to indicate it was easily the most popular form, but a quick look on a Google search seems to give the lie to this; I suspect a processing glitch throws up the spurious result. – Edwin Ashworth Oct 29 '19 at 14:59

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