Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Tom Lane writes:
>
>>The first two online dictionaries I checked (Merriam-Webster and
>>Cambridge) list *only* "multi-dimensional". IMHO the word is not
>>common enough in normal use to have lost its hyphen. You can get
>>away with not hyphenating in technical contexts where it's more
>>common, but that does not make the hyphenated form less correct.
>
> In my educated opinion, prefixes that are not words by themselves are
> never hyphenated (except possibly to avoid ambiguity). This applies to
> pre-, post-, non-, un-, in-, uni-, bi-, re- and so on, and there is no
> grammatical reason why it shouldn't apply to multi- as well. The rule
> that once a word becomes common enough it can be closed up only applies to
> compounds where each part is an independent word. webster.com agrees with
> this and also the dead tree dictionary I have here. There's also a more
> detailed explanation of this here: <http://www.bartleby.com/64/84.html>.
>
I see both forms in various references as being correct, but I think we
should consistently use one or the other. I'll make the change, but I'd
need a definitive answer on which way to go. Any other opinions out there?
Joe