Dodgeball / dodge ball. One word or two?

Language English Grammar & Usage
1

I was going through a book, preparing for class, and one of the phrases was ‘play dodge ball’. This didn’t look right to me so I googled it and everything there seemed to suggest dodgeball was one compound word. I then went back to my Word document and typed it in as one word and got called out by the spell checker. Right clicked and was given ‘dodge ball’. My Forumosa search tells me that Forumosans are split on the issue, with a few hyphenating the word/words.
I assume both ways are acceptable. Is that correct?

May I suggest a “Relearning English” forum?

2

Both dictionary.com and Wikipedia list it as a single word. MS Word doesn’t because Bill Gates is the devil. He probably wasn’t very good at dodgeball at school.

3

And it appears that Caves Books must be using MS Word as their editor.

4

Calling it “dodge ball” is as daft as writing “foot ball”, “hand ball”, “basket ball”, “volley ball”, “base ball”, “snow ball”, “meat ball”, “high ball”, “goof ball”, “curve ball”, “eight ball”, “hair ball”, “moth ball”, “slime ball” or “pin ball”.

5

Both seem to be acceptable, though common practice seems to favor using it as a single, combined word. Check out the Google Ngram viewer on it: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=dodgeball%2C+dodge+ball&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cdodgeball%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cdodge%20ball%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cdodgeball%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cdodge%20ball%3B%2Cc0

6

one word

7

A grave dig from someone in the grave :notworthy:

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