Quote:
is the OE supposed to be stuck together?
Yes.
The
OE ligature is largely extinct in English. Ligatures were originally invented to save space and make handwriting quicker, but with the invention of movable type printing, and especially the typewriter, the necessity of having to create an entire extra key for a rarely-used combination of vowels doomed the ligature to obscurity. In American English, words which used to have the OE ligature are now spelled with just "E", while in British English, many of those words are still spelled with "OE". "Confederation" is one of the few words where the "OE" spelling ("Confoederation") is not retained in British English.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis