Single-player, singleplayer or single player?

    You really should try coming up with your own humour instead of just latching onto others', D3. In fact, you should try coming up with something yourself period. xD

    But seriously, stop crapping up my thread. If you've nothing to contribute (as usual) then just go and order some more obsolete parts or something.

    I'm beginning to wonder if you've actually bothered to read the posts in this thread.

    There is a lot of ambiguity surrounding which one is correct on the web, with the results of the poll speaking for themselves. Would you rather I just made a thread moaning about games running and looking like shit despite playing it on a seven-year-old machine instead?

    There is no 'correct' answer, some words just pick up hypenation in common use while others are combined together.

    I use 'singleplayer', just like 'multiplayer'.

    I still stand on my point that it is the matter of colo(u)r, the different schools of english just write it either with hyphen or space, but I the singleplayer is so uncommon that it can't be right.

    The problem with English is that when a term is used a lot, people start to shorten it for ease and that new term gradually becomes part of the language. It's an evolving language, and doing this is actually valid by the textbooks. A hyphenated word which is used very commonly can have the hyphen legitimately dropped.

    An example is with "multiplayer". From a textbook perspective, that should always be written as "multi-player", where "multi-" is by definition the special prefix version of "multiple". However, since the term is used so often, the hyphen has just ended up dropped by pretty much everybody. But it's still valid.

    The distinction is that while "multiple" has a special version for use when prefixing, "single" has no such variant. As such, you have to use the term in both a prefix and adjective context.

    I guess it all comes down to whether you think of "single" in the context "single player" as a prefix or an adjective. If it's an adjective, then "single player" is correct. If you think of it as a prefix, which is still valid as it is being used as a direct alternative to "multi-", then the correct usage would be "single-player" or "singleplayer".

    So, you see, it's not quite that clean cut. But this thread isn't really about finding what the textbook correct term is, but instead what term that most people use so that I can look slightly less silly when using it!

    I would go with the case of single-minded and single-handed, where the prefix defines the property of the following word, when the word minded and handed both have a meaning alone, but when introducing the prefix the meaning of the word changes.

    Just like player has many meanings, the word single-player is used to describe the properties of something, e.g. a video game.

    Same goes with the multiplayer, but it is not hyphenated because multi- is actually shortened, from a longer desctription to be clearer when using adjacent with it's antonymous word.

    but I might be just making this overly complicated

    Quote from mike-0

    who seriously gives a fuck

    As funny as it might seem to you as american, some of us are actually interested in how english is written and spoken, not just "take it, chew it and spit it out".

    Multiplayer is widely accepted as being spelt, well, as multiplayer. So singleplayer makes sense, I guess.

    Quote

    The distinction is that while "multiple" has a special version for use when prefixing, "single" has no such variant. As such, you have to use the term in both a prefix and adjective context.

    Monoplayer?

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