See Wiktionary Terms of Use for details. Used together, they mean the same as goodnight: something said as a farewell gesture to someone who is leaving or someone who is hitting the hay.

You are not the only one who has run into this issue, mind you.

In summary, I don’t care how many university newspapers you’ve edited, or how many students you’ve improperly “corrected” on various spellings that YOU feel are wrong, despite decades of literature to the contrary. Best Sex Positions to Improve Your Sex Life. That’s why we have authoritative dictionaries: They teach us the correct way to spell words, they ARE the gospel, because they represent the consensus of committees of language scholars and experts in etymology, after pouring over hundreds of years of writing, both fiction and nonfiction. rev 2020.10.27.37904, The best answers are voted up and rise to the top, English Language & Usage Stack Exchange works best with JavaScript enabled, Start here for a quick overview of the site, Detailed answers to any questions you might have, Discuss the workings and policies of this site, Learn more about Stack Overflow the company, Learn more about hiring developers or posting ads with us, I might use the apostrophe to make it clear the person is saying, You may be interested to know that Marsha Norman wrote a very successful play titled. If you actually LOOK at the qualifications of the scholars who compile the major dictionaries of the world, there’s not a chance in hades you’d think, based on your “credentials”, that you’d even be considered for a job at Oxford. Fact is, something either is correct or it is not. That might go over better! You wouldn’t think that deciding whether goodnight or good night is the correct expression could be so difficult. The explanation: Bye is not an element, such as day or afternoon, that would normally stand on its own; bye is, in fact, merely a shortened form of goodbye. • What’s going on? Old-Earthers and Theistic Evolutionists: Are You Prepared to Call God Incompetent or a Deceiver? No, of course you wouldn’t (and if you are, you should stop!). Would you? Other languages actually had their own variant of this word, which also translated into both ‘unit of land’ and ‘early part of the day’ (for example, the Serbo-Croatian jutro). If you look at the German term Guten Morgen and research its history, you’ll find that it was used to address people plowing their fields in the early hours of the day. I probably won’t, as goodafternoon looks ridiculous to me. • Card game

“ Good night ” is a phrase with two separate parts. The problem is, oh arrogant one, you didn’t simply “weigh in” on the subject.

So, yes, I think context is the determinant. Let me elaborate, at night when you’re either on the phone, in person, text, or email, you can say, “Goodnight. Previous A Thing Greatly Feared, Chapter 22 Next The Krueller and the Camel, Hednilton Jose Marques Bastos Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. AskMen, Become a Better Man, Big Shiny Things, Mantics and guyQ are among the federally registered trademarks of Ziff Davis Canada, Inc. and may not be used by third parties without explicit permission. Street Fight 101: Is Jeet Kune Do Effective? (I hesitated to respond to a two-year-old post. Yes, the problem is your paranoia and attraction to drama. The message, Is there something wrong with my fictional lighthouse? When it’s just one word, it becomes a noun describing an act of wishing someone a good night. Interestingly, good night isn’t necessarily always just one word. Given that you’re calling me unreasonable based on my opinion on one narrow topic, and that you’re treating Oxford like it’s Gospel truth, you may want to reconsider which one of us is unreasonable and dogmatic. • Computer science

• Look what the cat dragged in!

Oxford Dictionaries Online recognizes “goodnight,” so apparently a pretty good number of people use it: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/goodnight. I am hoping for your reply, thank you so much. Are there different rules when conveying informal speech in writing? • Ungh, son! Luckily, the Internet has had enough common sense to mock this phenomenon since at least 2010. There is NOTHING backing up your blanket, unfounded assumption that writing it as goodnight, is wrong. night/goodnight isn't the same as bye/goodbye. Now, goodbye is a bit different. 2) Oxford is gospel? Get over it! Just look at your ignorant, misinformed post, and especially at your responses to the NUMEROUS people who correctly pointed out your errors.

An often-cited example is this sentence: • The father gave his daughter a goodnight kiss. I’ve never had a strong opinion on cannot vs. can not, never given it any extensive thought. Oh look! To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. Have you ever wondered why they aren’t more consistent? If you have received this message in error, please Incorrect: I’m wearing my lucky socks. To be honest I’m more confused now than before lol. So, you can use this term if you’re describing the late part of a day that was good for you for some reason. ( Log Out /  exclusively for the individual or entity to which it is addressed. The fact is, goodnight is properly written as goodnight, good night, AND good-night with the hyphen (Random House Unabridged Dictionary). You’re just as unyielding in your opinion as I am in mine, so that must make you bullheaded, as well. It does not matter whether you would say “goodday” or “goodevening”, what matters is that you can in fact say “goodnight”.

), I wouldn’t think too hard about spelling.