On the spelling of "subgenre" (18 November 2014)
- Points to consider
- I bet that just about any hyphened word composed of two properly spelled words will not trigger a spell checker. E.g., Firefox is just fine with both "sewage-food" and "swill-Bolshoi", probably for grammatical reasons (using a hyphen as a compound modifier).
- Spell checkers have a deliberately limited vocabulary, in order to limit false positives, and "subgenre" may not be included in your spell checker's list, leading to a false negative.
- Research completed
I checked before I started, and OneLook Dictionary Search gives four results for "sub-genre" (none of which lead to an actual, valid entry) versus twelve for "subgenre", of which:
- nine lead to entries for that spelling in dictionaries;
- one is Wikipedia's redirect to the "Genre" article;
- one is the Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary's entry for "sub-" (which only gives the syllabification for the word);
- one is a 404 error for ODLIS: Online Dictionary of Library and Information Science.
Also, I checked the British side of the Oxford Dictionaries, and still came up with "subgenre" for a search for "sub-genre".
Thus I believe "subgenre" is the correct spelling.
