In the Swing API spec, the event dispatch thread is often called the event *dispatching* thread. There are further variations as to capitalization, hyphenation, and the use of "a" versus "the". Except for the last issue (see below), these are not significant technical communication problems; I think everybody know what's referred to. However, such stylistic variations look very unprofessional.

Suggested standard: "dispatching" is unacceptable, because of SwingWorker.isDispatchThread(). Beyond that, my own intuition says "all lower case, no hyphens". (A professional copy editor might disagree; I don't have that kind of background.) But what specific usage we choose is less important than picking one and using it consistently.

About definite versus indefinite article: This is not just a language geek's quibble. Swing is a single-threaded library built on AWT, a multi-threaded library. Ignoring this fact carries a high risk of introducing concurrency bugs. To emphasize and clarify this fact, we must always say "*the* Swing event dispatch thread" but "*a* AWT event dispatch thread".