Used in the sense ofno ornone, to show lack of or failure to perform; or in the sense ofnot, to negate the meaning of the word to which it is prefixed.
nonabiding is the practice of avoiding mental constructs during daily life,nonacceptance is a neglect or refusal to accept,nonaccumulative is tending to avoid accumulation
nonaccent is a spoken accent that is neutral and undistinctive;nonacrocentric is having the centromere near the middle, and thus having roughly equal-sized arms;nonaccent is an unaccented beat or syllable, as in music or poetry
Non- may be joined to a word with a hyphen, standard in British usage as evidenced byOED's typically including only the hyphenated forms, but some OED entries are spelled without hyphen only. In American usage,non- is often joined without a hyphen. (For example,nonbaseball is relatively common, butnoncricket, referring to a primarily British sport, is rare.) Somenon- words rarely or never use a hyphen (such asnonentity). By contrast,un- is almost always spelled without a hyphen. GPO manual item 6.29. recommends to spellnon- prefixed words without a hyphen unless an overriding consideration applies.[1]
For combinations with capitalized words such as proper nouns and some adjectives, hyphen is almost always used, e.g.non-Aristotelian ornon-English. This matches GPO manual recommendation.[1]
Semantically,non- suggestsobjective quality and logical opposition (henceungradable), whereasun- suggestssubjective quality and polar/diametric opposition (often gradable).
Meaning "not" in phrases taken from Latin and some other languages,non is a separate word and is not hyphenated:non compos mentis,persona non grata.
Asnon- is a living and highly productive prefix, the list of words having the prefixnon- is practically unlimited: Wiktionary currently has over 9000 such word forms. It is particularly common in the sciences.
non-:Used in the sense ofno ornone, to show lack of or failure to perform; or in the sense ofnot, to negate the meaning of the word to which it is prefixed.
