Light standards

Add comment March 11th, 2009

Green light, red light, traffic light — each of these nouns should be written as two words.

As a verb for “to approve,” the first one is one word, as in, “The chairman indicated he would greenlight the project.”

As a modifier, the second one is hyphenated: “Police traced the suspect to the city’s red-light district.”

However, the following should all be written as one word: streetlight, stoplight, spotlight, floodlight, footlights, headlight, taillight, highlight, sidelight.

I hope you found this illuminating.