Subtotal vs total - English Language Usage Stack Exchange "Subtotal" is similar to "subcategory", where it means a "smaller part of a larger group"; in the former, the subtotal is a smaller group within the larger total, and the latter, subcategory is a smaller group within a larger category –
Should I use hyphens with prefixes like sub and semi? Whichever way is standard for a given word As a general rule, the hyphen is more likely to be used in situations where you're expected to read "sub-" as a separate unit, and it gets lost when the entire compound word gets common enough to be perceived as an entity in and of itself
Is substract (versus subtract) a proper word? "Subtract" is the word Though the obsolete word "substract" did exist, any occurrence you see these days is most likely just a common mistake, formed by analogy either with "abstract" or with other languages whose corresponding words do have two ‘s’s