I read an interesting column in the Toronto Star this morning.

The author bemoans the fact that budget cuts have resulted in the loss of one of the newsroom’s most needed individuals.

While I share the author’s lament for the newsrooms of yesteryear and concern for higher standards, it’s the last sentence in the article that caught my attention.

It reads:  Is it copy editor or copyeditor?   Should it appear as two words or one word?  I’d like to add a third layer of complexity to the puzzle: what about the hyphenated “copy-editor?”

The question is interesting for several reasons:

(1) If we write copyeditor as one word, then it would be a compound noun. It’s like the words “candlelight” or “streetcar”. Two separate nouns are fused to create a compound noun which takes on a meaning that is distinct from the original two nouns.

(2) If we write copy editor as two words, then the word “copy” could be considered to be an adjective modifying the noun, editor.  A copy editor is a specific type of editor, as opposed to a city editor, which – if my memory serves me correctly – is not really responsible for checking mistakes, spelling, punctuation, style or grammar. A city editor in Canada primarily distributes assignments to reporters and tracks daily news events.

(3) If we hyphenate the word copy-editor, it is difficult to determine the exact function of the hyphen. Is it being used to ease reading and avoid ambiguity? Is the hyphen used to join two words “that when used together form a separate concept”, as stated in the Canadian Press Stylebook  (page 387)?

Back to the puzzle: which one of these options should we choose?  Option 1, 2 or 3?  Or, could it be that they are all acceptable?

If I had to make a decision, I would be heavily in favour of the compound noun form – copyeditor.

Here’s my rationale:  to copyedit is a verb.

It is written as one word, not two.

To copyedit means to check for factual mistakes, legal liability, inconsistencies, repetition as well as grammar, spelling and punctuation in a piece of writing.  I see it as a problem-solving process which contains different stages of discovery. This process safeguards the integrity of a piece of writing.

Because the verb is written as one word, it stands to reason that the noun form should also be written as one word for consistency.

The job of a copyeditor is to copyedit.

Let’s go back to option 3 for a moment. Can verbs in the English language be hyphenated?  Would it be correct to write: “to copy-edit”?  If so, then the use of the hyphenated noun form would also be acceptable.  After all, we can say: “to freeze-dry” (to dry something by extracting moisture) and “to ice-skate” (to skate on ice)?   If we follow this line of thinking, then to copy-edit would mean to edit copy (words/text).

We have to ask ourselves if this is an accurate definition of a copyeditor.  I don’t think it is.  There’s a lot more to copyediting than mundane mechanical corrections.  For starters, tact and sensitivity are required to dish out constructive criticism to a writer.

Copyeditor – as one word – makes the most sense to me.

Having spoken my piece, it’s important to state that all three versions are present in different types of American, Canadian and British publications.

British stylebooks and other books about the process of copyediting published in the U.K., prefer to use the hyphenated version. Both the two-word version and the one-word version appear in magazines and published books.

Given the presence of all three different versions, perhaps it is best to conclude that all three versions have become acceptable and that they substantively mean the same thing.

While we’re on the topic of copyediting, I thought I would try to poke around and find the origin of the word.

According to William S. Solomon in his article “Tasks and Status: Newspaper Copy Editing and the Division of Newroom Labour” (April 1991), the first copyeditor emerged after the American Civil War, as the growth of the newspaper business created the need for the division of labour.  The article says: “this process continued into the 20th century, with the copy editor becoming increasingly more removed from the processes of gathering and writing the news. At the same time, the reporter’s social status began to rise. As a result of these two trends, the copy editor’s status declined markedly.”

Now that this puzzle is out of the way, let’s move on to the next one.

Is it type-o, typo, Typ-o or Type O?