Is the spelling fundraising, fund-raising or fund raising?

I have seen different spellings for fundraising and would like to know the current best practice. The history of this word/phrase is also of interest to me.

Solution 1:

Google Books' Ngram Viewer has some severe limitations in its ability to track hyphenated words—but in the case of fund raising vs. fund-raising vs. fundraising, Ngram's bad behavior actually helps underscore the dominance of the spelling fundraising in current usage.

Because the Ngram algorithm treats instances of fund-raising as though the word were spelled as two separate word with no hyphen (fund raising), an Ngram chart that tracks fund raising (blue line) versus fundraising (red line) is actually tracking the relative frequency of fund raising and fund-raising against that of fundraising. Here is the Ngram chart for the period 1930–2008:

The chart indicates that from the late 1930s (when the terms began to be used with some degree of frequency) until the mid-1980s, the popularity of fund raising and fund-raising (considered together) exceeded the popularity of fundraising (considered by itself); but from the early 1990s through the end of the chart (2008), fundraising has been considerably more popular than the other two combined.

The treatment of the term in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary series is far more conservative than I would have expected, given the Ngram data. Through the Eighth Collegiate (1973), there is no entry for the term—not because the term didn't exist, but because the dictionary viewed it as consisting of two separate words (fund and raising) that did not possess any special, otherwise uninferable meaning as a compound expression.

The Ninth Collegiate (1983) breaks with its predecessors by including an entry for fund-raising (with a hyphen) as a noun and dating the word to 1940. That is not surprising. But the Tenth Collegiate (1993), the Eleventh Collegiate (2003), and even the current online Merriam-Webster persist in spelling fund-raising as a hyphenated word. It seems quite clear to me that actual usage has left MW behind.

Far more in tune with the times is The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, which went from having no entry for the term in its 1980 edition to including a listing for fundraising or fund-raising in its third edition (1992) to dropping the hyphenated form altogether in its fifth edition (2011).

Publishers that base their spelling decisions on guidance from Merriam-Webster will either insist on the spelling fund-raising or will include fundraising in its in-house style guide as an explicit overruling of MW's spelling preference. Publishers that follow AHDEL (a number that is growing as American Heritage continues to publish new editions of its print dictionary every ten years or so, while Merriam-Webster hasn't published a new print dictionary since 2003) will use fundraising.

If you aren't required to follow an established house style, you're free to choose the spelling/ punctuation style you prefer, but it seems clear that fundraising is rapidly eclipsing its rivals in the publishing world at large.