Non???Profit Chris Coyier

June 17, 2010

I was proofreading something the other day and the word “Non Profit” was in the text. I wondered if that was correct. It became quite the rabbit hole.

Automatic capitalization is out. You should only capitalize if it’s part of a title, name, or starts a sentence. So the debate is largely “nonprofit” vs. “non-profit”

• Google fight turns up far more usage of “non-profit.”
• Wikipedia hyphenates the title of the article, but uses both styles throughout the article nearly equally.
• My friend Justin who is getting a Masters in [this field] management, says in living and breathing this stuff for years, “nonprofit” is what is used “inside the bubble.
• The biggest academic publication is Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly.
• There is the publication Nonprofit Quarterly.
• Some say the context matters, as in, if it’s being used as a noun e.g. “I work for a nonprofit.” or if “non” is being used to modify the word “profit” as a noun. “This is a non-profit organization.”
• The AP stylebook says it’s non hyphenated.
• It may depend on the country you are in, U.S. being “nonprofit” and U.K. being “non-profit.”
• Asking my own twitter followers, “non-profit” was far more common a response.
• My master’s degree friend from above polled his twitter followers and “nonprofit” was far more common a response.
• People that work for them even have different opinions, or just don’t know.
• Some dictionaries have both. If they only have one or the other, they have “nonprofit.”

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