The tech scene is innovative in all aspects, not least in the linguistic one. Whether you spell it ‘start-up’, ‘startup’, ‘start up’, or ‘StartUp’ most likely won’t make any difference in the success of your business – you can write it wrong and succeed, or write it correctly and fail. Nevertheless, you probably want to know which one of the above-mentioned alternative spelling is the correct one – or at least acceptable – for your next pitch, application for funding, article or blog post.
Rules and usage
‘Start up’, with a space in between ‘start’ and ‘up’ is a phrasal verb that means to begin or to rise suddenly. If you are using it as a verb then go for ‘start up’. Examples from Ludwig:
‘Start up’ is never a noun and you can’t use it to indicate a company.
‘StartUp’ is used only by designers that show creativity only when it comes to grammar. It’s an inexistent word have that hurt my eyes. It has 0 hits on Ludwig
The two real candidates are ‘start-up’ and ‘startup’.
The two terms have been fighting each other for some decades and the war isn’t over yet.
Grammar purists, widely supported by prominent media and trusted style and grammar sources (namely: The Chicago Manual of Style, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the BBC, the New York Times and many others) consider the hyphenated version to be grammatically correct. The form ‘startup’ would just be a vernacular term of growing popularity.
Nevertheless, it is worth noting that, TechCrunch, the bible of tech, as well as several other top tech media like Wired and TheNextWeb, use ‘startup’. Such spelling has become accepted also by some more linguistically conservative sources like The Wall Street Journal and The Economist (which uses both forms).
If we look at the trends on Google Books, we discover that books tend to favor the hyphenated form, but one should take into account that on average books tend to be more conservative than common use.
It is probably just one of my silly speculations but I was intrigued by the apparent synchrony between the rise and fall of ‘startup’ word and the dot-com bubble of 2000.
The picture changes radically if we look at how people actually use both terms. In fact, if we were to compare the two terms on Google Trends (as above ‘start-up’ is in red and ‘startup’ in blue), we would discover that
‘startup’ is more common hands down, compared to the more formal ‘start-up’.
Ludwig’s wrap-up
Whether you use ‘startup’ or ‘start-up’ does not make a big difference, especially for the success of your venture; at Ludwig, we’ve decided drop down the hyphen and to go with ‘startup’, unless a manual of style would require us to use ‘start-up’.
- On those hateful applications with a maximum number of characters, every single character counts. Even a hyphen can make the difference.
- One digit less means more productivity.
- Languages are living organisms that change depending on how they’re used and ‘startup’ is by far more common.
- We love to contribute to the change of the English language, especially if this pisses off some purist.
- It’s the industry standard.
