This just in: the short version of the Oxford English Dictionary is dropping the hyphen from some 16,000 compound words due to a number of factors, not least of which is the influence of the internet on written communication ("oh noes!") but also because people find them to be confusing and designers aren't fond of them either.
Fortunately, there's still a place for some hyphenation in those cases where the lack would generate an ambiguous construct (the article notes that there is a difference between a party that has twenty-odd people and a party that has twenty odd people -- namely that I'm much more likely to be attending the latter).
Comic courtesy of XKCD; used without permission
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