filmgoer ?

Yes, a filmgoer is "one who goes to see movies". The hyphen is not standard usage. Moviegoer and cinemagoer are also perfectly acceptable terms.

Hi Lin. Hi Val. they are compound nouns ofcourse, right ?. Is it a formal way to use hyphen for compound nouns.

Thanks

No, Nav, hyphens do not denote formality. Hyphens are often used for new additions to the language, ie. new word combinations. After a time, the hyphen is dropped.

When exactly this happens is not exactly clear but many prescriptivists tend to be rather anal retentive so you often see someone screaming that a hyphen is necessary when it actually isn't.

Hi JTT, long time no see

Sometimes the hyphen is never dropped, if the compound would read oddly or just look ugly without it. Many people write "book-keeper" rather than "bookkeeper" simply because the double K looks unnatural. And "co-operative usually keeps its hyphen, although the word is 400 years old, because the two Os in "cooperative" inevitably look as though they were a single sound.

I agree with Syntinen that some words do retain hyphens but from my reading, the tendency seems to be towards dropping them, at least in NaE.

Googled: at <.com>

Results 1 - 10 of about 49,900,000 English pages for "cooperative".

Results 1 - 10 of about 3,930,000 English pages for "co-operative".

Results 1 - 10 of about 907,000 English pages for "bookkeeper".

Results 1 - 10 of about 122,000 English pages for "book-keeper".

+++++++++++++++

Googled: UK pages only

Results 1 - 10 of about 657,000 for "cooperative"

Results 1 - 10 of about 730,000 for "co-operative".

Results 1 - 10 of about 62,700 for "bookkeeper".

Results 1 - 10 of about 42,800 for "book-keeper".

+++++++++++++

What I did notice was that many people treat 'book keeper' as a two word compound rather than a one word.

I remember being taught by one insistent teacher to spell coöperative with a diaeresis (not, properly speaking, an umlaut). Anything else could not be properly pronounced. I failed to kuperate, though.