Two-word compounds--namedopen compounds in Edward N. Teall'sMeet Mr. Hyphen--are in fact very common.
1966, Ladislas Országh,Deficiencies of Modern English Dictionaries inEnglish Studies Today, Fourth Series[1]:
Thus such words, to give only a very few examples, aspismire,baise-mains,favonian,hearstling,happenstance,chanticleer, andopen compounds likeguardhouse lawyer,sidewalk superintendent andslush fund are registered without any kind of status label ...
1971,Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, Volume 5[2]:
Further, the language permitsopen compounds, as indicated above, so that we might conjecture such spellings as "battlecry, battle-field, battle ground, battle-piece and battlewise."
1981,Jewish Language Review:
Should the Yiddish nounris-uf 'start' be written as an open or a hyphenated compound? TheMEYYED gives it as anopen compound (ris uf) in the English- Yiddish ...
The examples also exemplify the three forms that compound words take: 1)open compound (snail mail); 2) hyphenated compound (eagle-eyed); and 3) solid compound (bookworm).
In anopen compound, the component words are separate, with no hyphen (well fed;wagon train).
2011,Language-independent Compound Splitting with Morphological Operations[6]:
Some compounds are written as space-separated words, which are calledopen compounds (e.g.hard drive), while others are written as single words, which are called closed compounds (e.g.wallpaper). In this paper, we shall focus only on closed compounds becauseopen compounds do not require further splitting.
English compound on Wikipedia.Wikipedia