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Which is correct: Vice President or Vice-President?
Thanks.
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Koh Elaine wrote:Which is correct: Vice President or Vice-President?
Thanks. Koh Elaine: this is an interesting question, as per the Google Ngram analysis (vice president vs vice-president), the use of the hyphen seems to depend on whether it's British English or American English, at least as far as common usage goes. American English writes it "vice president" by a large margin, while British English uses either spelling about equally. And per the Ngram analysis, in English literature (books from all users of English), it's been up and down and all around over the decades. If you checked the spelling in The Free Dictionary, it comes up as "vice president" with a secondary spelling with the hyphen; other on-line dictionaries I checked are sort of silent on the use of the hyphen, just spelling it "vice president." British, Australian, and other English-speaking posters might want to weigh in on this, but it's been my experience as an American, that the most common and correct spelling is: vice president.
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Well, we don't often nominate presidents for our vices, here in Britain. We keep out vices to ourselves.  However, I think mactoria is right - the lack of hyphen is one of those "new-fangled" Americanisms.  It seems (checking the n-gram viewer as mactoria did) that even in America, the hyphenated version was more used until about 1980 (except for an odd anomaly around 1830). Just for interest, I also checked 'vice chancellor' and 'vice-chancellor'. The graphs are here. The results are very similar, but the non-hyphenated form is even less popular.
Wyrd bið ful aræd - bull!
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I wonder if there is one single country with British English domination having presidents or vice presidents. Anyhow, both forms are equally understandable.
In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.
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I wondered about that - I just checked, and there are several African "Commonwealth Nations" with Presidents. Plus Sri Lanka.
I think that in most of them the English taught would be mainly influenced by British English, but is probably not the first language of the country.
Even South Africa, less than 10% of the population speak English as their first language.
Wyrd bið ful aræd - bull!
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"Vice" comes from a preposition (no longer current) or a word-forming element (depending upon the dictionary you use) which means "in place of".
In the U.S., the title is Vice President, no hyphen. For other countries, one would need to know how they title the position, because it is equally correct to write Vice-president.
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I agree - both are now considered correct, no problem. However . . . the earliest official notes I can find (possibly one could be more thorough) are these: they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as president, and in distinct ballots the person voted for as vice-president; and they shall make distinct lists of all persons ... - Massachusetts. General Court. House of Representatives - 1701 Act and Resolves . At the General Assembly of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations ... July, 1776-Oct. 1800 A View of the Political Conduct of Aaron Burr, Esq., Vice-president of the United States (Printed in 1802, now kept in the University of California library) An Argument on the Duties of the Vice-President of the U. States, as President of the Senate (by Patrick Henry, in the National Journal, 1827) REPORT OF THE SERGEANT-AT-ARMS, UNITED STATES SENATE December 4th 1893 
Wyrd bið ful aræd - bull!
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Thanks, Ruth and DragOnspeaker.
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the vice president or the vice-president.
Me Gathering Pebbles at The Seashore.-Aj
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