Livingroom - It's ONE Word!

Online dictionaries and spellcheckers for your word processing programs are inaccurately correcting you about the spelling of "livingroom"!

VOCABULARYWRITINGREVISION

Dave Janas

5/7/20262 min read

A brown leather sofa with a white throw blanket and gallery wall behind

As I edit my own work and the work of others, I am continually besieged by Word and Pages and GoogleDocs continually telling me that livingroom is spelled wrong.

They keep saying it should be two words: living and then room.

This is wrong! This is a lie! and I will continue this fight until everyone believes me and the software people change their program dictionaries.

Yes, somewhere along the line since the days of WordStar, our application spelling dictionaries have made an error.

Livingroom is one word.

Think about it. Why would it be split into two words? In your own home, you have a bedroom, and a bathroom. Those are one word. Why wouldn’t you have a livingroom? Or a familyroom? Or, in Chicago, a frontroom?

There is no reason to separate them. If you type them as two individual words, of course they will show as ‘correct’ with no red lines beneath because each individual word is spelled individually correctly.

How else do I know I’m right and they’re wrong?

Newspapers from the past!

The most common spots are in advertisements and the classifieds, but there you see it!

My point is made. Don’t let the online spellchecker push you around! Fight the power!

Let your characters relax in their livingrooms!