Should anti- and counterclockwise be hyphenated?

I've got a document in which I'm defining counterclockwise and mentioning that it is sometimes also called anti-clockwise. The document is in American English, and generally in line with the Chicago Manual of Style. CMoS seems to suggest counterclockwise (no hyphen), but anti-clockwise seems to me to be a predominantly British-English term, and the OED seems to indicate that the hyphen should be present there. Should I hyphenate either or both of counterclockwise and anti-clockwise? Why?

Solution 1:

I think you will find counterclockwise to be most often unhyphenated and anti-clockwise/anticlockwise to be as often hyphenated as not (and it appears that the unhyphenated version is gaining traction)

EDIT: A little more evidence (note that counter clockwise shows hits for both counter clockwise and counter-clockwise, and the same for anti clockwise) to clear up the issue.

It appears to me that the unhyphenated form "wins" for both words.

Solution 2:

Very good question. Typically, terms coined as combinations of two words to create a word of a different type, or with an uncommonly-used prefix to the word, are hyphenated. As in my previous sentence, the adverb "uncommonly" and the verb "used" are hyphenated to create a single adjective "uncommonly-used", modifying the noun "prefix". Similarly, novel uses of prefixes like pre-, sub-, anti-, pro-, non-, etc. are hyphenated when the term is first coined. However, if a hyphenated term passes into common use and becomes thought of as its own word and not just a modification of another, it often becomes acceptable to omit the hyphen.

My vote is that both the hyphenated and non-hyphenated spellings are perfectly acceptable. As far as the will of the mob goes, the Google test says that your initial premise is backwards; "anticlockwise", unhyphenated, is far and away the more common spelling of that word (24m results for the unhyphenated word; only 2.9m for hyphenated), while the hyphenated "counter-clockwise" is the more common spelling there, but not by nearly as much (6.5m hyphenated to 4.9m unhyphenated).

Solution 3:

-thanks to snumpy for pointing out that hypens break NGrams - use spaces instead

so here's counter-clockwise vs. anti-clockwise vs. counterclockwise vs. anticlockwise