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A 'hyphen' ( '‐' ) is a punctuation mark. It is used both to join words and to separate syllables. It is often confused with the dashes ( '–', '—', '―' ), which are longer and have different functions. The use of hyphens is called ''Hyphenation''.

Contents

Customs of usage

Examples of usage

Origin and history of the hyphen

Hyphens in computing

International Standard dates

See also

External links

Customs of usage

A definitive collection of hyphen rules does not exist. Therefore, the writer or editor should consult a manual of style or dictionary of his or her preference, particularly for the country in which he or she is writing. The rules of style that apply to dashes and hyphens have evolved to support ease of reading in complex constructions; editors often accept deviations from them that will support, rather than hinder, ease of reading.
Texts may be automatically hyphenated via hyphenation algorithms; when employed in concert with dictionaries, such hyphenation is sufficient for most informal texts.

★ Spaces should not be placed between a hyphen and either of the words it connects except when using a suspended hyphen (e.g. ''nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers''—see below).

★ Except for noun–noun and adverb–adjective compound modifiers, when a compound modifier appears ''before'' a term, the compound modifier is generally hyphenated to prevent any possible misunderstanding, such as ''American-football player''. Without the hyphen, there is potential confusion about whether ''American'' applies to ''football'' or ''player''. Compound modifiers can extend to three or more words, as in ''ice-cream-flavored candy''.

★ Hyphens are generally ''not'' used in noun–noun or adverb–adjective compound modifiers when no such confusion is possible; for example:

★
★ ''government standards organization'' and ''department store manager''

★
★ ''wholly owned subsidiary'' and ''quickly moving vehicle'' (because the adverbs clearly modify the verbs; ''quickly'' obviously does not apply to ''vehicle'' as ''quickly vehicle'' would be meaningless).

★ However, the hyphen joining the adverb ''more'' and the adjective ''important'' in the phrase ''more-important reasons'' distinguishes that phrase from ''more important reasons'', where ''more'' is an adjective. A mass-noun example is the following: ''more-beautiful scenery'' as distinct from ''more beautiful scenery''.

★ Hyphenation is also common with adjective–noun compound modifiers but, arguably, less generally. Examples are ''real-world example'' and ''left-handed catch''. Where the adjective–noun phrase would be plural standing alone, it usually becomes singular and hyphenated when modifying another noun. For example, ''four days'' becomes ''four-day week''.

★ Two-word names of numbers less than one hundred are hyphenated. For instance, the number ''23'' should be written ''twenty-three'', and ''123'' should be written ''one hundred and twenty-three''. (The ''and'' is sometimes omitted in America)

★ Hyphens are occasionally used to denote syllabification, as in ''syl-lab-i-fi-ca-tion''. Most American dictionaries use an interpunct, sometimes called a "middle dot" or "hyphenation point", for this purpose, as in ''syl·lab·i·fi·ca·tion''. Similarly, hyphens may be used to imply the spelling of a word, such as "W-O-R-D spells word."

★ Hyphens are sometimes used in English to denote syllable breaks, particularly for prefixes, as when a (repeated) vowel is pronounced on its own rather than being silent or merged in a diphthong, as in 'shell-like' and 'anti-intellectual', where some other languages (and some English authorities) use a diaeresis like 'noël'. In British English, hyphens are also occasionally employed where readers would otherwise be tempted into a mispronunciation (e.g. ''co-worker'' is so punctuated partly to prevent the reader's eye being caught automatically by the word ''cow''—though see also the following note on prefixes).

★ Certain prefixes (''co-'', ''pre-'', ''mid-'', ''de-'', ''non-'', ''anti-'', etc.) are often hyphenated, though usage varies between American and British English. British English tends towards hyphenation (''pre-school'', ''co-worker'') whereas American English tends towards omission of the hyphen (''preschool'', ''coworker''). A hyphen is mandatory when a prefix is applied to a proper (capitalized) adjective (''un-American''). The AP Stylebook provides further information on the use of "co-" as a prefix.

★ Some words are hyphenated to distinguish them from other words that would otherwise be homographs, such as "recreation" (fun or sport) and "re-creation" (in forensics), or "predate" (what a predator does) and "pre-date" (to be of an earlier calendar date).

★ If a word begins on one line of text and continues into the following line, a hyphen is usually inserted immediately before the split. Note that the details of doing this properly are complex and language-dependent and that they interact with other typesetting practices: see justification and hyphenation algorithm.

★ Some married couples compose a new surname (sometimes referred to as a double-barrelled name) for their new family by combining their two surnames with a hyphen. Jane Doe and John Smith might become Jane and John Smith-Doe, or Doe-Smith, for instance. In some countries, however, only the woman hyphenates her birth surname, appending her husband's surname.

★ Hyphens are used to connect numbers and words, whether numerals or written out, as in ''28-year-old woman'' (cf. ''twenty-eight-year-old woman'') or ''320-foot wingspan'', in forming adjectival phrases (particularly with weights and measures). The SI recommends against this practice when using abbreviated metric units. The same usually holds for abbreviated time units.

★ They are also used in spelled-out fractions as adjectives (but not as nouns), such as 'two-thirds majority' and 'one-eighth portion'.

★ A suspended hyphen (also referred to as a "hanging hyphen" or "dangling hyphen") may be used when a single base word is being used with separate but back-to-back hyphenated words that are themselves connected by "and", "or", or "to". "Nineteenth-century and twentieth-century" can instead be written "nineteenth- and twentieth-century".
The use of the hyphen has, in general, been steadily declining, both in popular writing and in scholarly journals. Its use is almost always avoided by those who write for newspapers, for advertising copy or for labels on packaging, since they are often more concerned with visual cleanliness than semantic clarity; the words are left with spaces. However, it is still used in most (American) newspapers and magazines; hence people remain accustomed to seeing and understanding its use. In other countries hyphens are dropped in favour of connecting the two-word compounds.
An en dash ('–') sometimes replaces the hyphen in hyphenated compounds if either of its constituent parts is already hyphenated or contains a space (e.g. ''high-priority–high-pressure tasks'' (tasks which are both high-priority and high-pressure). Hyphens are often used where en dashes are more properly used, in ranges (''pp. 312–14''), relationships (''blood–brain barrier'') and to convey the sense of ''to'' (''Boston–Washington race'').

Examples of usage

Some strong examples of semantic changes caused by the placement of hyphens:

★ ''disease-causing poor nutrition'', meaning poor nutrition that causes disease

★ ''disease causing poor nutrition'', meaning a disease that causes poor nutrition

★ a ''man-eating shark'' is a carnivorous fish

★ a ''man eating shark'' is a male human in the active process of consuming shark meat
Additional examples of proper use:

★ ''text-only document'' or ''the document is text-only''

★ ''Detroit-based organization'' or ''the organization is Detroit-based''

★ ''state-of-the-art product'' or ''the product is state-of-the-art'' (but ''The state of the art is very advanced.'' with no hyphen)

★ ''board-certified strategy'' or ''the strategy is board-certified''

★ ''thought-provoking argument'' or ''the argument is thought-provoking''

★ ''time-sensitive error'' or ''the error is time-sensitive''

★ ''case-sensitive password'' or ''the password is case-sensitive''

★ ''government-issued photo ID'' or ''the photo ID is government-issued'' (but ''…is issued by the government'' with no hyphen.)

★ ''light-gathering surface'' or ''the surface is light-gathering''

★ ''award-winning novel'' or ''the novel is award-winning'' (but, more likely, ''…won an award'' with no hyphen)

★ ''web-based encyclopedia'' or ''the encyclopedia is web-based''

★ ''fun-loving person'' or ''the person is fun-loving''

★ ''how to wire-transfer funds''

★ ''how to tax-plan''

★ ''advertising-supported service'' or ''service is advertising-supported'' (but, better, ''…is supported by advertising'' with no hyphen.)

★ ''Rudolph Giuliani is an Italian-American'' (but see 'hyphenated American')

★ ''list of China-related topics'' ''…list of topics is China-related'' (but ''…related to China'' with no hyphen)

★ ''out-of-body experience''

★ ''near-death experience''

★ in surnames, for example Dominique Strauss-Kahn
Note, though, that many authoritative sources, such as the Chicago Manual of Style, recommend writing commonplace compounds open (i.e., without hyphen) when they appear after the noun they modify and when they are used adverbially. Thus

★ ''She always wears out-of-date clothes.''
but

★ ''Her wardrobe is out of date.''
Similarly, for the adverbial use compare

★ ''The hand-to-hand combat was frightful.''
and

★ ''They fought hand to hand in repulsing the attack.''

Origin and history of the hyphen

The likely first use of the hyphen—and its origination—ought to be credited to Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany circa 1455 with the publication of his 42-line Bible. Examination of an original copy on vellum (Hubay index #35) in the U. S. Library of Congress shows Gutenberg's movable type was set justified in a uniform style, 42 equal lines per page.
The Gutenberg Printing Press required that words made up of individual letters of type had to be held in place by surrounding the page with a non-printing rigid frame. Gutenberg solved the problem of making each line the same length to fit the frame by inserting a hyphen as the last element at the right side margin. This interrupted the letters in the last word, requiring the remaining letters be carried over to the start of the line below. His hypen appears throughout the bible as a short, double line inclined to the right at a 60-degree angle.
Prior to Gutenberg setting the first lines printed in the Western world with moveable type, there was no need for hyphens or justifying lines to equal length. The hyphen solved the equal lines problem created by the rigid frame of Gutenberg's printing press.
In medieval times and the early days of printing, the predecessor of the comma was a slash. As the hyphen ought not to be confused with this, a double-slash was used, this resembling an equals sign tilted like a slash. Writing forms changed with time, and included the full development of the comma, so the hyphen could become one horizontal stroke.
However, publishers of dictionaries liked that a tilted symbol would give them a little extra room in their books. Those dictionaries based on the second edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary used one small, slightly tilted slash for a hyphen which they added at the end of a line where they broke the word, but used a double-slash much like the very old symbol to indicate a hyphen which needs to be in a phrase and just happened to get at the end of the line. This double-slash would be used in hyphenated phrases in the middle of the text as well, so that there would be no confusion.

Hyphens in computing

In the ASCII character encoding, the hyphen was encoded as character 45. Technically, this character is called the 'hyphen-minus', as it is also used as the minus sign and for dashes. In Unicode, this same character is encoded as ( - ) so that Unicode remains compatible with ASCII. However, Unicode also encodes the hyphen and minus separately, as U+2010 ( ‐ ) and U+2212 ( − ), respectively, along with a series of dashes. Usage of the hyphen-minus character is discouraged where possible, in favour of the specific hyphen character.
When flowing text, it is sometimes preferable to break a word in half so that it continues on another line rather than moving the entire word to the next line. Since it is difficult for a computer program to automatically make good decisions on when to hyphenate a word the concept of a 'soft hyphen' was introduced to allow manual specification of a place where a hyphenated break was allowed without forcing a line break in an inconvenient place if the text was later reflowed. Soft hyphens are most useful when the width is known but future editability is desired, as few would have the patience to put them in at every place they believed a hyphenated split was acceptable (as would be needed for their meaningful use on a medium like the Web, however CSS3 introduces language specific hyphenation dictionaries which solves this).
When flowing text, a system may consider the soft hyphen to be a point at which a word may be broken, and display a hyphen at the end of the broken line; if the line is not broken at that point the hyphen is not displayed. In most parts of ISO-8859 the soft hyphen is at position 0xAD, and since the first 256 positions in Unicode are taken from ISO-8859-1, it has a Unicode codepoint of U+00AD. In HTML, the soft hyphen is encoded as the character entity ‘­’.
Most text systems consider a hyphen to be a word boundary and a valid point at which to break a line when flowing text. However, this is not always desirable behavior, especially when it could lead to ambiguity (such as in the examples given before, where ‘recreation’ and ‘re-creation’ would be indistinguishable). For this purpose, Unicode also encodes a 'non-breaking hyphen' as U+2011 ( ‑ ). This character looks identical to the regular hyphen, but is not treated as a word boundary.
The ASCII hyphen-minus character is also often used when specifying parameters to programs in a command line interface. The character is usually followed by one or more letters that indicate specific actions. Typically it is called a dash in this context. This is used in many different operating systems, particularly Unix and Unix-like systems. DOS and Microsoft Windows also sometimes make use of the hyphen, although the use of a forward slash (/) is more prevalent there. A parameter by itself that is only a single hyphen without any letters usually means that a program is supposed to handle data coming from the standard input or send data to the standard output. Two hyphen-minus characters ( -- ) are used on some programs to specify “long options” where more descriptive action names are used. This is a common feature of GNU software.

International Standard dates

Main articles: date and time notation by country

Continental Europeans use the hyphen to delineate parts within a written date. Germans and Slavs also used Roman numerals for the month; ''14‑VII‑1789'', for example, is one way of writing the first Bastille Day, though this usage is rapidly falling out of favour. Plaques on the wall of the Moscow Kremlin are written this way. Usage of hyphens, as opposed to the slashes used in the English language, is specified for international standards.
International standard ISO 8601, which was accepted as European Standard EN 28601 and incorporated into various typographic style guides (e.g., DIN 5008 in Germany), brought about a new standard using the hyphen. Now all official European governmental documents use this. These norms prescribe writing dates using hyphens: 1789-07-14 is the new way of writing the first Bastille Day.
This method has even gained influence within North America. This is due to the fact that most common computer filesystems make the use of slashes difficult or impossible. Windows uses both and / as the directory separator, and / is also used to introduce and separate switches to shell commands. Unix-like systems use / as a directory separator and while is legal in filenames it is awkward to use as the shell uses it as an escape character. Unix also uses a space followed by a hyphen to introduce switches. The non-year form is also identical apart from the separator used to the standard American representation. The ISO date format is also sorted correctly by a dumb sort routine which can be useful in many computing situations including the aforementioned filenames. Many computer systems and IT technicians have switched to this method. The government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for example, has switched to this method, although it has not yet been imposed upon society at large.

See also

★ Hyphen War

★ Double hyphen

★ Dash

★ Minus -

External links

★ A Grammar Book help for hyphen rules

★ Economist Style Guide — Hyphens

★ Jukka Korpela, Soft hyphen (SHY) - a hard problem?

★ Markus Kuhn, Unicode interpretation of SOFT HYPHEN breaks ISO 8859-1 compatibility. Unicode Technical Committee document L2/03-155R, June 2003.

★ Juicio Brennan, Online Lyric Hyphenator (hyphenates English)

★ Igor Podlubny, On-line Hyphenator (hyphenates Slovak)