It's not as bad as "lose"/"loose," but I see quite a few people, including people who write for a living, mistakenly hyphenating "no one," as in "No-one believes that." It looks very strange to my eye, and irritates me. Where does that come from?

Where does that come from?

No-one knows.

Given my limited gramar and spelling skills, it is useful to see these little tidbits posted, especially when they arn't directed at me.

You think the hyphen looks odd, I can remember seeing it rendered as a single word: "noone."

Not as often as hyphenated, perhaps, but jarring even just once.

None know, Brian.

It's because no one is an orthographic exception in the indefinite pronoun paradigm in English:

everybody
anybody
somebody
nobody

everything
anything
something
nothing

everyone
anyone
someone
no one

Notice that no one is stressed as a single word, like the rest of the indefinite pronouns: it's pronounced NO one, not NO ONE as when it's two separate words (as in "There's NO ONE solution to this problem.")

Since no one is pronounced as one word, people want to spell it as one word. Spelling it noone doesn't work because that looks like it should rhyme with noon, so people fall back on no-one (which occurs in the OED's 1851 citation for no one, BTW).

Maybe we should agree to spell it noöne, by analogy with coördination and coöperation. There are currently about 500 Google hits for that spelling.

Maybe we should agree to spell it

My keyboards seem to lack the 'ö' character.

Without taking away from Tensor, it's still typically an error. It should be hyphenated when it's used as a adjective. "The TV show has a no-one cast--and no one's writing it!"

It's probably being hyphenated because "noone" is not permissible in many spell checkers, but "no-one" doesn't squawk (including the Firefox- and Word-ones). So I would say the no-one upsurge is due to the lag in grammar-checker intelligence behind spellchecker intelligence ("spellchecker" squawks on Firefox, but not Word, but both squawk on "grammarchecker") that is responsible for this fad that will fade. In the future, it will take one to no one.

It comes from ignorance.

The problem with software spell checkers is that many of them are produced by people who can't spell, so that sometimes they spread the problem rather than solving it. Not that printed dictionaries don't have errors too.

I'm probably going to continue to use no-one as "no one" has a different use and meaning to me (and both sounds and reads far too Oxford English), sorry Rand ^_^;