Artist's block or artist block, which is correct? [closed]

I've always thought artist's block was correct but then when doing some research recently I've also stumbled upon artist block (without apostrophe "s") quite a bit too. They can't both be correct can they? Which one is correct grammatically?

Solution 1:

It's not so much what is grammatically correct as which term is most commonly used. In this case google ngram searches of published writing can be useful.

I ran an ngram search for the phrases writer's block, writer block, artist block and artist's block and found that writer's block is so much more common than the other three that it makes comparison between the other three impossible.

I, therefore, ran a search for writer block, artist block and artist's block and found that, of those three, artist's block was by far the most common.

Artist's block is quite uncommon but the phrases artist block and writer block are so uncommon that they can safely be considered to be unused if not incorrect. I shall continue to use writer's block and I may start to use artist's block which I had not previously encountered but I shall shun writer block and artist block completely as mis-writings of the possessive terms.