Meghan Walbert is Lifehacker's Managing Editor. She has a degree in journalism and has worked at Lifehacker as a writer and editor since 2018, covering parenting, foster care, online child safety, and ...

According to my 1933 Oxford Universal Dictionary, “good-bye” and “co-operate” are hyphenated, neither “leg room” nor “birth rate” can be run together into single word, and “teenager” doesn’t exist.

Have you noticed that, lately, you’re less inclined to stick a hyphen between words? That is, you’re looking at a term like “a time honored tradition,” realizing you could put a hyphen in ...