Startup or start-up? (Or start up?)

Short answer: it's startup for the company and start up for the verb. Start-up isn't wrong, it's just wearing a blazer to a hoodie party.

That's it. You can go now. Or stay for the bit where we explain why, and then politely mention what we do.

The rules in ten seconds

• A new company: startup. She left her job to found a startup.

• The act of starting something: start up. Give the server a minute to start up.

• The old-school version of the noun: start-up. Still in some dictionaries and The Economist. Fine, just a bit 2009.

• Describing a thing: startup (or start-up). Startup costs, startup culture. Pick one and stick with it.

Why the hyphen is on its way out

Compound words have a habit of slowly losing their hyphens. E-mail became email. On-line became online. Web site became website, and nobody held a funeral.

Startup is most of the way through the same journey. The AP Stylebook and most of the tech press have gone with startup. Oxford's learner's dictionary and The Economist are still holding the line with start-up.

So if you're writing for The Economist, keep the hyphen. Otherwise, the only person who'll notice is the one in your group chat who still types "e-mail".

The one mistake that actually matters

The hyphen debate is a matter of taste. This one isn't:

Wrong: We want to startup a business.

Right: We want to start up a business.

The verb is always two words. Quick test: if you could swap in "launch", or stick "it" in the middle ("start it up"), it's two words.

Spelling sorted. Now the hard bit.

Getting the word right takes ten seconds. Getting the business right takes a bit longer, and there's a lot more to it than a hyphen.

We're awesome., a creative agency that works with startups on the bits that matter early on: a brand that doesn't look like a template, a website that does its job, and software built properly from the first version so you're not rewriting it in a panic at Series A.

If you're looking to start up a startup (see what we did there), have a look at how we work with startups →