The use of the hyphen in English compound nouns and verbs has, in general, been steadily declining. Compounds that might once have been hyphenated are increasingly left with spaces or are combined into one word. In 2007, the sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary removed the hyphens from 16,000 entries, such as fig-leaf (now fig leaf), pot-belly (now pot belly) and pigeon-hole (now pigeonhole).^[1] The advent of the Internet and the increasing prevalence of computer technology have given rise to a subset of common nouns that may in the past have been hyphenated (e.g. "toolbar", "hyperlink", "pastebin").