orthography - Timepoint vs. time point


When speaking of a point in time, what would be the proper usage:


"Timepoint" vs. "Time point"?


This funny confusion comes from my life as a programmer: While one of our style checkers enforces "timepoint" instead of "time point", another style checker contradicts that and prefers "time point" over "timepoint"...



Answer



Very nice! Methinks you have unearthed a compound word in the making.


I did a narrowly-focused (1995-2005) Google lit search for both time point and timepoint, and learned both terms seem to be found most often in technical writing − often describing scientific, statistically-driven experiments.


The two-word time point is running far ahead of the one-word timepoint (by a ratio of about 10-to-1, at this point in time, at least). However, who am I to argue with the likes of Campbell and Heyer, genome researchers who wrote:



Three microarray hybridizations were carried out for each timepoint.



I don't know anything about microarray hybridizations; I'm not going to intervene as their grammar police.


The main problem with your style checkers is not that they disagree; rather, they should allow both as admissable forms.


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