Q: “Quick question – proofreading is definitely one word isn’t it? My mum was adamant it is 2 words or at least hyphenated.”
A: Your mum’s not wrong. Like a lot of spelling and grammar it’s a matter of personal preference and locality. Originally (1930s) the term was proof read and then became hyphenated (proof-read) as per my 1963 Newnes family dictionary. In a process of natural evolution it has since been compounded to become one word. Is your mum British? Proof-read tends to be more popular in British-English. American-English prefers proofread. The Oxford Concise Dictionary, Cambridge University Press and the Collins English dictionary lists it as proofread but the Random House dictionary has it currently as proof-read.
The compound word is significantly more popular on the internet. A Google search will return 558,000 results for proof-read/proof read and 2,540,000 for proofread and that’s my basis for using it even though I was taught proof-read at school.
Hope that helps and please thank your mum for giving me a blog post idea.