A Word, Please:

A Google news search for the word “bailout” turns up more than 70,000 hits. Yet I hold in my hands a dictionary that says there’s no such word. It’s an edition of the “Oxford Universal Dictionary” that was last revised in (here comes the rub) 1955. And now that you know the year, you won’t be as surprised to learn that my 2002 “Webster’s New World College Dictionary” emphatically disagrees: “bailout. 1. a helping out of one in difficulty. 2. a providing of government financial aid to a failing company, city, etc.”

Word origins can be mysterious, eluding even experts. But compounds, words that are basically a fusion of two words commonly used together, are a lot less mysterious. They’re often formed over time as word pairings become so common that people start to see them as single units. That’s when they become single units.

The trick to them has nothing to do with tracing their evolution. It’s keeping track of which terms are one word, which are two, which are hyphenated — and trying not to go nuts in the process.

Take “everyday.” Most dictionaries and style guides I know of say this is a one-word adjective. “The store offers everyday values.” But when you use it in a sentence like, “The store offers values every day,” it’s not one word. It’s two. Only when it’s doing the job of an adjective is it one word.

How, you wonder, can you be expected to know such things? You can’t. And you’re not. There’s no simple rule for knowing when and whether makeup, lineup, longtime or passersby is one word. No one expects you to know them all. The best you can hope for is to be aware of some of the most common ones, to know a few guidelines that can help and to have the gumption to open up a dictionary.

“Longtime,” for example, is one word. Like “everyday,” this applies to its adjective form but not when it’s used as a noun. “Her longtime companion has been with her for a long time.” But compare that to “long-term,” which as an adjective is hyphenated. “They have a long-term relationship.”

That’s the kind of tidbit that you either have to learn or look up.