There are road maps and there are roadmaps. One word or two?
3-minute read
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“We’re on a road to nowhere…”
On 11 May 2020 the UK government put before parliament its plan for the way out of Covid-19 restrictions. The day before that the prime minister made an address to the nation which was widely criticised for its lack of clarity.
In the 50-page document, roadmap (spelled thus, as one word) appears no less/fewer than seven times.
The Scottish government, however, spells it as two words. Perhaps it followed the dictionaries. So which is correct?
Well, obviously, both are. If you look in the dictionaries – Oxford Online, Collins, Cobuild, Merriam–Webster, Webster’s New World College, Oxford Advanced Learner’s, Cambridge – you will find it as two words. But here’s the thing. Words like this with a space between their two elements are what is known as “open compounds”. Over time, almost like old couples, they merge into one. It’s a historical process that has happened repeatedly. When Jane Austen wrote any body she did not mean “any old cadaver’”; body in her sense meant “person”.
“It is very pretty,” said Mr. Woodhouse [sc. to Emma]. “So prettily done! Just as your drawings always are, my dear. I do not know any body who draws so well as you do.
When the great humanist Roger Ascham expressed his views on education, he wrote in deed, as was common, says the OED, until 1600 or thereabouts.
The Scholehouse should be in deede, as it is called by name, the house of playe and pleasure.
a1568 Scholemaster (1570) Pref.
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Other examples going further back in time are alone (all adverb+one), although (all adverb+though) and albeit (all conjunction+be+it.) An analogous process produces the frowned-on *alot for a lot. The people who write it as a single word clearly perceive it as a unit of meaning in its own right and not dependent on the meaning of lot.
Someone on Twitter suggested that the road map spelling refers to the physical object and roadmap to the figurative meaning. It sounds vaguely plausible, but the only similar duo I can think of is black bird/blackbird, a distinction which is rather different.
In any case, the literal meaning is nowadays pretty rare (satnav rules, OK!) and searches in corpora show that both forms are used for both literal and figurative meanings.
In an up-to-date corpus of 20 varieties of English, roadmap is about twice as common as road map. In a corpus built in 2104, the two forms were even-stevens, just about, but by the time of a 2018 corpus the ratio was 3:1 in favour of roadmap.
So, editors might be in a bit of a quandary if they come across road map. Should they change it to roadmap? The safest bet would be to raise it with the author and point out that the dictionaries are behind the curve. (I have it on good authority that the next Macmillan revision will change to roadmap.)
Meanwhile, let’s see how long we wait before most dictionaries mirror this new reality.
