Have you ever wondered which is the correct spelling, bed bugs or bedbug?

According to Google’s ngram viewer, a measure of word frequency in scanned books, “bedbugs” as a single word is used far more frequently. Yet Google trends, which measures search terms, reports the exact opposite. This means that authors are writing about bedbugs, but the general public is searching for bed bugs.

So who is correct?

The convention among American entomologists is to treat common names where the insect category (“bug”) is correct as separate words, but to combine names into single words when the insect category is incorrect. Example: the house fly is really a fly, but a firefly is really a beetle. Since bed bugs belong to Hemiptera- the true bugs- then in our country, at least, the appropriate spelling is bed bug as two words.

Google Trends is a public web facility of Google Inc., based on Google Search, which shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages. The horizontal axis of the main graph represents time (starting from 2004), and the vertical is how often a term is searched for relative to the total number of searches, globally.

Google Trends

Try Google Trends, you can have a lot of fun. You can compare anything to anything, it can be very interesting comparing anything you like. If you are looking for a new business then use Google Trends to find out what are popular products that are becoming more popular.

Do you use Bed Bugs or Bedbugs?