How do words get concatenated?

Question

Lots of words in the English language are or were two words originally.

Somehow
Nobody
Erstwhile

But many often conjoined words are not 'allowed'. The one that springs to mind is 'alot'.

Why are some of these ok, and others not? How do these joined-up words enter English vocabulary but not others?

Dictionaries describe usage at least as much as they prescribe it. See e.g. Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on — about 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary — RegDwigнt, Oct 26 '12 at 21:59
I'm voting to close this as Not Constructive. But I won't vote to delete if the chance comes up, because I want to cite this as the "original" when I vote to close every future "Who decides what's valid English?" question as a duplicate. — FumbleFingers, Oct 27 '12 at 00:23
This question is at risk of being closed "not really a question" because it is incomplete: shows no research. It can be improved by showing the research done before asking the question. — MetaEd, Oct 27 '12 at 03:08
If we knew the "real" answer to this question, we would know the future of the English language and be able to exactly predict any and all trends. We do not have such an answer, though. Instead, we can only offer the tautological observation that the changes and shifts that successfully catch on or replace the conventions of previous linguistic generations are the kinds of changes that were inevitable in hindsight. That is, it is what it is. Sometimes we can capture a shift as it happens, but there's rarely a why. At best, there's a how. — Zairja, Oct 27 '12 at 03:39
+1 I donot think this is "notreally a question" or even "not a realquestion". — Kris, Oct 27 '12 at 04:42
@RegDwighт Were the words written some-how, no-body with a hyphen earlier? — Kris, Oct 27 '12 at 04:44
Judging by comments, some of the community disagree with a fact that it appears you are assuming in your question. The question is written as if some words are "allowed" and others "not allowed" as if there is some kind of authority that decides such things. It may not help, though, to fix that in your question, because there is another problem: your question looks like a duplicate of this one. If you disagree you might need to clarify how your question is different. — MetaEd, May 28 '13 at 20:09
@MετάEd That is an almost exact duplicate. Thank you for making me aware of it! — AncientSwordRage, May 29 '13 at 08:44
I agree it is the same as any other “Who decides what a word it, and how it is spelt”. However I will add that it usually evolves through hyphenation. So at first people will write a-lot, if that catches on, then may-be the hyphen will be dropped, maybe not. (note hyphens also have other uses). — ctrl-alt-delor, May 14 '18 at 12:01

How do words get concatenated?

0 Answers0