The man eating lobster refused to wear a bib. The addition of a hyphen can dramatically change the meaning of a sentence, as in this classic example: The hyphen signals to readers that the words it connects must be understood as a whole. What is the purpose of a hyphen?Ī hyphen (-) usually forms compound words. While you can always refer to your Write for Business Guide for complete hyphen rules, this tip will focus on some common hyphen uses and abuses. We want to make hyphen usage less confusing. These concerns led to this epic rant by Jen Doll of The Atlantic. Other times, they are scattered about with no particular purpose. When hyphens are used, they sometimes get confused with dashes. doesn’t even include the hyphen in its list of six major punctuation marks. Hyphens certainly aren’t making it on many people’s Mount Rushmore of punctuation. If you did, well, eTips might be your spirit animal. We bet you didn’t wake up this morning expecting to contemplate hyphens. “The commonplace hyphen is everywhere and nowhere, a generic entity oft subbed for the real thing (i.e., the em- or en-dash), used willy-nilly, thrown in when one feels like it, as if it's salt or pepper being added to a stew. So don't sweat it too much.-Bite-sized advice for better business writing.
#Follow up hyphen manual
The Oxford University Press style manual points out that ‘If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad’. In 2007, the sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary removed the hyphens from 16,000 entries including ‘figleaf’, ‘potbelly’ and ‘pigeonhole’. More interesting hyphen stuff: The hyphen is an endangered species in English. If you think there’s any risk of ambiguity, stick one in. She re-covered the sofa – she put a new cover on the sofa. Some examples of the difference a hyphen can make:Ī man-eating chicken – a chicken that eats humans.Ī man eating chicken – a man who’s eating chicken. But coordinator doesn’t need one.Īnd we hyphenate words that are spelt the same but can have very different meanings or different pronunciations (called homographs, fact-fans) like ‘recreation’ (fun) and ‘re-creation’ (creating again). So you’d hyphenate co-worker, for example, to stop people tripping up over ‘cow’ when they read it. Because shelllike looks weird.Īlso use a hyphen if there’s a risk of mispronouncing a word. Use a hyphen with prefixes or suffixes (such as ‘-like’) when you’ve repeated letters in a word, but you pronounce them separately, as in shell-like or anti-inflammatory. Long-established words like ‘preamble’ and ‘degrade’ don’t need a hyphen as the prefix is seen as fully fused. If you’re adding a prefix like ‘pre’, ‘un’, ‘non’ or ‘anti’ to a proper adjective (that’s an adjective made from a proper noun like American, Japanese, Victorian), use a hyphen: un-American, non-EC countries. A document is up to date but it’s an up-to-date document. Same goes for up to date – if it’s before a noun it needs a hyphen. So we say an easy-to-remember number, but the number is easy to remember. When it comes after the noun, the compound adjective usually doesn’t get a hyphen. This is how they work:Īn adjective describes a noun, like ‘the written word’.Ī compound adjective does the same thing, but it’s made up of more than one word, like ‘round-the-clock support’.Ī compound adjective usually gets a hyphen when it comes before a noun, like in ‘a well-honed piece of writing’.īut if the first word ends in ‘ly’, like in ‘a specially designed workshop’, you don’t need a hyphen. When an adjective’s made up of more than one word There are two situations where you’re likely to need a hyphen. First, look it up in the dictionary and go with what they say.
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