Idioms – Is Single-Word Inbetween Becoming More Acceptable?

idiomsprepositional-phrasesprepositions

I get the distinct feeling that "inbetween" occurs increasingly often as a single word, but I'm not at all clear on why it's used more in some contexts than others.

What I can is see that in Google Books, "are inbetween" occurs far less often than "are in between", whereas "the inbetween" occurs more often than "the in between". What's going on?

Best Answer

I had not previously been aware of seeing it printed other than as two words, but the practice seems not to be particularly new. The OED records the hyphenated noun in-between as meaning ‘(a) An interval. (b) A person who intervenes.’ The first citation is dated 1815:

He's fallen in love with Lady Naglefort, because she's an in-between.

It’s followed a year later in Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’ by:

Busy . . . talking and listening, and forming all these schemes in the in-betweens.

As an adjective meaning ‘placed between’, it occurs first, once again hyphenated, in 1898:

White or pale-coloured silk, with an in-between layer of chiffon.

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