We’re only going to cover one topic today and it’s the difference between thank you (as two words), thankyou (as one word), and thank-you (hyphenated). This one can be confusing so this should be a helpful post!
Contents:
Thank You
Our first contender is Thank you.
So… 99.999997% of the time, thank you as two words is the version you’re looking for:
- Thank you for the date last night
- Yes, thank you, I will have a slice of pizza
- Thank you for your feedback on this new initiative
Used in this way, it’s a verb: I thank you.
Thankyou
Thankyou as one word is not seen terribly often, but it’s still important to note!
Used in this way, it can be used as a noun to express thanks:
- Management provided a pizza lunch to staff as a thankyou for their feedback on the new initiative
- I just wanted to give you a personal thankyou for filling me in on that meeting
- There were thankyous all round after the product launch
And it can also be used as an adjective to describe something which gives thanks:
- I’m writing a thankyou post on social media
- The newlyweds wrote heaps of thankyou cards
- That’s a lot of thankyou pizzas
Can you see how in this instance the thankyou is describing the thing you’re talking about? In your thing itself, you would write ‘thank you’ as two words, e.g. ‘Thank you for attending our wedding’.
Thank-you
Here’s the plot twist…
So… Thank you is either one word or two and never hyphenated. However… Certain style guides may prefer thank-you over thankyou.
While pretty rare, it’s still worth noting in case you stumble across this at some point in your life and think to yourself ‘Why on earth wasn’t I warned?’ Well, now you have been.
It does seem though that the one word version Thankyou is still the preferred way though, so I would use this one unless someone tells you otherwise.
If you enjoyed this post, I highly recommend you also read my two-part series Is this one word or two? Part 1 | Part 2 and also my segment on Alot vs A lot,