“Super Heroes” or “Superheroes”?
Either Way, They Save the World
Ezra with Thor and Thor’s Hammer at the hoodoo known as Thor’s Hammer in Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah, on May 23, 2022.
A few weeks ago I asked Ezra, who is three years old and a devotee of anything that involves fighting bad guys, if “superhero” should be one or two words. He immediately and confidently proclaimed that “superhero” should be two words.
The kids’ Marvel books that we check out from the library (e.g., Hulk: An Origin Story or This Is Thor) follow this style. In fact, they capitalize each word of the term: “Super Hero.”
If you’re a longtime reader, you know how I feel about unnecessary capitalization. And Merriam-Webster, The Chicago Manual of Style, and The AP Stylebook all agree that the one-word version is the correct one. (Sorry, Ezra!) CMOS doesn’t have specific guidance within the manual, but in their online feature CMOS Shop Talk, the word “superhero” is used in a post or two. AP, on the other hand, clearly explains that “superhero” is their guidance, and Merriam-Webster doesn’t even list “super hero” as an alternate spelling.
Although “Super Hero” does seem to be the official term in the Marvel universe, I’m not going to gainsay the trifecta of authority in CMOS, AP, and Merriam-Webster. If I were sending a text to someone and saying that my kid likes superheroes, I would type the term as one word.
Still, if you want to, you can follow Ezra’s guidance here. He also sometimes calls Captain America et al. “fun people,” his own coinage, so you could use that term too. ☺️ And if Ezra wanted me to write down my own superhero story featuring Marvel characters like Captain America or Hawkeye, I might write “Super Hero.”
According to AP, the bad guys that the Avengers fight are “supervillains.” No hyphen needed even though it might seem more natural to put one in front of a v than in front of an h. Marvel, of course, would call Ultron, Thanos, and company “Super Villains.”
(As a side note, it doesn’t seem like the term “superheroine” is ever used, so refer to Captain Marvel, Black Widow, etc. as the gender-neutral “superheroes”: “The superhero Captain Marvel . . .”)
I am willing to completely follow Marvel’s perspective on the spelling of the names of individual superheroes. “Spiderman” is incorrect. The name is actually “Spider-Man.” And it’s “Iron Man,” not “Ironman.”
But maybe the tendency toward two words is more of a Marvel thing, rather than a superheroes-in-general pattern. After all, Batman’s lair is “the Batcave,” not “the Bat Cave.”
Beating through the thicket of English, while relying on the assistance of Captain America to cut through the brambles,
Rebekah Slonim
P.S. I promised a while ago to discuss more rules of hyphenation, but I’m not sure I can distill it better than The Chicago Manual of Style does in their excellent hyphenation guide, located at section 7.89 in the manual. CMOS offers a thirty-day trial if you don’t have a subscription and want to access the hyphenation table. If you have any questions about CMOS hyphenation rules, send me an email!