Ready to loosen up the old brain muscles? Good. Let’s tackle warm up vs. warm-up.

Warm-up is the noun that means the stretching you do before exercising or a game: Jenny did warm-ups before the soccer match. It’s also an adjective: Jenny wondered what would be the best warm-up stretches before the lacrosse match. Increasingly, writers are dropping the hyphen and simply spelling the word as warmup.

Warm up, without the hyphen but with the space, is a verb that shows one increasingly likes an idea or thing: Jenny began to warm up to the idea of going out for field hockey.

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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.