Words being joined together

[Lifeisabeach]

The classic one is "alot" for a lot, but there are a couple of others that make me irrationally annoyed, and I'm not sure whether I'm right to be.

First one is "noone" instead of no one. It isn't a word is it? I'm seeing it all the time at the moment.

The other one is "livingroom" - it's two words surely?

Well, "alot" does look wrong to me, but are the others a big deal?

I think I'd be happy with hyphenated forms, eg no-one and living-room, and it's not too surprising if the hyphen gets dropped out. After all, nowhere, nothing, nobody, bedroom, bathroom are all single words with no hyphen. But I would agree that noone and livingroom are easy to trip over when reading (that double o in noone, the unfamiliarity of livingroom as a single word), so would avoid them in my writing to improve readability.

You're right to take a dim view of "livingroom", as "living" isn't a noun, so doesn't lend itself well to this kind of thing. That's why there's no sign of "sleeping bag" or whipping-boy" becoming one word, though I don't suppose people consciously think that they'll draw the line at marrying up gerunds and nouns to make new words.

"Alot" is clearly bonkers, as if we're to start uniting articles with the nouns they identify ("thelot" would qualify too), we might as well stop using articles completely and speak Russian or Latin.

And "noone", unless you are Nigel Molesworth, is the time when you might start to feel the pangs of hunger. QED.

Another one I see often is 'aswell'.

... which in correct usage is usually followed by "party this is".

prism

Alright is another one that seems to be creeping in everywhere.