I am proofreading copy for our commencement program, and have come upon a mystery. Two of our honorary degree recipients this year are best-selling authors. Each is described in his biographical blurb has having written a best-seller, only one is described as the author of a "bestseller," and the other as the author of a "best seller."

So I attempted to look it up and find out which was correct. OneLook has "bestseller" listed in 10 dictionaries, "best seller" listed in 11, and "best-seller" listed in five. The M-W on my shelf hyphenates it. New York Times lists popular books as "Best Sellers." USA Today has a web page devoted to "Best-Selling Books Database" which lists "best sellers." (Actually, that one I get.)

Which do you prefer or use, and why?

Wordmatic, who is going with the hyphen, just because.

I tend to eschew the hyphen in compounds, endo- or exocentric. It's a bad habit I picked up from reading Joyce. So, bestseller.

When you do a search on amazon.com, you can list your search results in order of "Relevance" or by "Bestselling".

FWIW (For What It's Worth)

Just found out AP Style is "best seller."

Now have to check CMOS and APA. This could turn out to be my fifth career...

I doubt if there is a hard and fast rule out there, but I tend to hyphenate compounds when they are used as an adjective, and don't hyphenate (using a space if there is any question in my mind about whether the compound is a single word) when they are not.

I agree there is no hard and fast rule; I just thought it was funny, as in humorous, that there was such complete disagreement on this one. Obviously it's a term that is in mid-morph between being two words and one compound word.

WM

quote: Just found out AP Style is "best seller."

??? From the AP Stylebook, "Ask the Editor," about halfway down:

Which is correct: best selling, bestselling or best-selling? – from Detroit, MI on Mon, Dec 11, 2006

AP uses the hyphenated forms: best-seller, best-selling.

My preference is the fewer the hyphens, the better. For example, I don't like health-care provider; instead we either write health care provider or healthcare provider, though I do understand Myth's point. In this case, I'd say (and I believe my organization would agree) bestseller.

Well, we finally settled on "best seller" because it was AP Style, which is the style that we follow in most of our writing.

Being a picky editor type (which I've come to know here is prescriptivism) I tend to love hyphens and that rule about hyphenation of compound modifiers. That's why it made sense to me that USA Today had hyphenated "Best-selling books database." But sometimes when I'm reading The New Yorker, I trip over the hyper-hyphenation, which proves that we're all descriptivists; we just have different limits!

WM

Being a picky editor type (which I've come to know here is prescriptivism) I tend to love hyphens and that rule about hyphenation of compound modifiers.

I've known editors who were not prescriptivists, but dyed-in-the-wool descriptivists. It's a common misconception that only the former are sticklers. The real separation is that the latter simply use/enforce the rules from some style guide. The former make up elaborate rationalizations about how the rules aree somehow real, rational, god-given, or necessary. An example would be why it's wrong to use the third-person plural pronoun in English to refer to an individual antecedent of unspecified gender.

But seriously, the main difference is how one describes (instead of prescribes) the rules empirically, and that has to do with observing how the language is used, usually by the best speakers and writers. I know of no descriptivists who ignore rules or write scholarly papers in dialect *might be run to read once or twice).

Well, we finally settled on "best seller" because it was AP Style, which is the style that we follow in most of our writing.

NO!!!! AP style is to use a hyphen; see my link above.

It is best seller. Two Words, no hyphen. The latest AP Syle Manual denotes it as so. You can also refer the the New York Times Best Seller list if you need further confirmation.

Welcome aboard, smylz!

If I remember correctly, my post a year ago was saying only that you used a hyphen in the AP style (the New York Times, as I recall, was non-hyphenated). I gather from your post that AP has changed, and now goes non-hyphenated too.(I can't access the current AP manual, but I believe you 100%.)

Interestingly, it looks like some of the AP writers have not yet gotten the message. See the first paragraph of its recent Randy Pausch obituary, the 3rd (final) story at this link.

The hyphen seems right in the adjectival case; no hyphen otherwise. But what do I know - I can't use an apostrophe correctly, much less a hyphen.

Asa, who thinks a hyphen is a character from Greek mythology or a Viet Nam seaport.

quote:

It is best seller. Two Words, no hyphen. The latest AP Syle Manual denotes it as so. You can also refer the the New York Times Best Seller list if you need further confirmation.

Welcome, Smylz! Please see your private messages.

We have several posters here from the UK, and they use the hyphen more than Americans do. There are differences in style manuals, of course. I don't use AP; I use CMS, for example.

Welcome, as well, from a relative newbie.

I don't take the NYT as gospel on anything these days.

Do you have a link to the AP? When I searched there, I got answers that said they use a hyphen.

The Times Style and Usage Guide (that's the original "Times" - not the New York Times) suggests "bestseller" and "bestselling". The Windows spellchecker (also unhyphenated according to the TSUG) tries to correct the form into the hyphenated version - doubtless this is because Windows is a US program (although I do have my spellchecker set to UK English).

TSUG says of hyphenation, "generally be sparing of hyphens and run together words where the sense suggests and where they look familiar and right". It then goes on to give some exceptions to the rule, one of the most important of which is that words are hyphenated when the last letter of the first part is the same as the first letter of the word to which it attaches. For example, pre-empt; co-ordinate; film-maker. But prearrange; prewar; nonconformist.

We should always remember that a style guide is exactly what it says it is - a guide to the preferred style of whoever prepared it.
It isn't a grammar.

With that said my preference is for "best seller" (two words) as a noun and "best-selling" (two words with a hyphen) as an adjective.

quote:

We should always remember that a style guide is exactly what it says it is - a guide to the preferred style of whoever prepared it.
It isn't a grammar.

Quite so. And people have a right to the preferred source. Having said which I reckon "The Times" is surely a pretty good source for those of us who use UK English.

Come to think of it, wouldn't "American English" fit appropriately in the Oxymorons theme?