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>.
--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net