Hyphen

The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation.[1] Non-hyphenated is an example of a hyphenated word. The hyphen should not be confused with dashes (figure dash , en dash , em dash , horizontal bar ), which are longer and have different uses, or with the minus sign , which is also longer and more vertically centred in some typefaces.

Hyphen
- ־
Hyphen-minus Non-breaking hyphen Hebrew maqaf

As an orthographic concept, the hyphen is a single entity. In terms of character encoding and display, the entity is represented by any of several characters and glyphs including Unicode hyphens, hyphen-minuses, soft or optional hyphens, and non-breaking hyphens, depending on the context of use (discussed below).

The hyphen-minus is widely used as a hyphen, since the Unicode hyphen is difficult to enter using a standard computer keyboard and impossible on a typewriter. (It is also used as the minus sign in spreadsheets and programming languages, hence the hyphenated name.)

Although hyphens are not to be confused with en dashes, there are some overlaps in usage (in which either a hyphen or an en dash may be acceptable, depending on user preference, as discussed below). In addition, the hyphen often substitutes for the en dash elsewhere in informal writing.

Etymology

The word is derived from Ancient Greek ὑφ' ἕν (huph' hén), contracted from ὑπό ἕν (hypó hén), "in one" (literally "under one").[2][3] An (ἡ) ὑφέν ((he) hyphén) was an undertie-like sign written below two adjacent letters to indicate that they belong to the same word when it was necessary to avoid ambiguity, before word spacing was practiced.

Use in English

The English language does not have definitive hyphenation rules,[4] though various style guides provide detailed usage recommendations, and have a significant amount of overlap in what they advise. Hyphens are mostly used to break single words into parts, or to join ordinarily separate words into single words. Spaces are not placed between a hyphen and either of the elements it connects except when using a suspended or "hanging" hyphen that stands in for a repeated word (e.g., nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers). Style conventions that apply to hyphens (and dashes) have evolved to support ease of reading in complex constructions; editors often accept deviations if they aid rather than hinder easy comprehension.

The use of the hyphen in English compound nouns and verbs has, in general, been steadily declining. Compounds that might once have been hyphenated are increasingly left with spaces or are combined into one word. Reflecting this changing usage, in 2007, the sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary removed the hyphens from 16,000 entries, such as fig-leaf (now fig leaf), pot-belly (now pot belly) and pigeon-hole (now pigeonhole).[5] The increasing prevalence of computer technology and the advent of the Internet have given rise to a subset of common nouns that might have been hyphenated in the past (e.g. toolbar, hyperlink, pastebin).

Despite decreased use, hyphenation remains the norm in certain compound-modifier constructions and, among some authors, with certain prefixes (see below). Hyphenation is also routinely used as part of syllabification in justified texts to avoid unsightly spacing (especially in columns with narrow measure, as when used with newspapers).

Justification and line-wrapping

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. The word may be divided at the nearest break point between syllables (syllabification), and a hyphen inserted to indicate that the letters form a word fragment, rather than a full word. This allows more efficient use of paper, allows flush appearance of right-side margins (justification) without oddly large word spaces, and decreases the problem of rivers. This kind of hyphenation is most useful when the width of the column (called the measure in typography) is very narrow. For example:

Justified text
without hyphenation
Justified text
with hyphenation

We,       therefore,      the
representatives of the United
States of America ...

  

We, therefore, the represen-
tatives of the United States
of America ...

The details of doing this properly are complex and language-dependent, and can interact with other orthographic and typesetting practices. Hyphenation algorithms, when employed in concert with dictionaries, are sufficient for all but the most formal texts.

It may be necessary to distinguish an incidental line-break hyphen from one integral to a word being mentioned (as when used in a dictionary) or present in an original text being quoted (when in a critical edition)—not only to control its word wrap behavior (which encoding handles with hard and soft hyphens having the same glyph) but also to differentiate appearance (with a different glyph). Webster's Third New International Dictionary[6] and the Chambers Dictionary[7] use a double hyphen for integral hyphens and a single hyphen for line-breaks, whereas Kromhout's Afrikaans–English dictionary uses the opposite convention.[8] The Concise Oxford Dictionary (fifth edition) repeated an integral hyphen at the start of the following line.[9]

Prefixes and suffixes

Prefixes (such as de-, pre-, re-, and non-[10]) and suffixes (such as -less, -like, -ness, and -hood) are sometimes hyphenated, especially when the unhyphenated spelling resembles another word or when the affixation is deemed misinterpretable, ambiguous, or somehow "odd-looking" (for example, having two consecutive monographs that look like the digraphs of English, like e+a, e+e, or e+i). However, the unhyphenated style, which is also called closed up or solid, is usually preferred, particularly when the derivative has been relatively familiarized or popularized through extensive use in various contexts. As a rule of thumb, affixes are not hyphenated unless the lack of a hyphen would hurt clarity.

The hyphen may be used between vowel letters (e.g., ee, ea, ei) to indicate that they do not form a digraph. Some words have both hyphenated and unhyphenated variants: de-escalate/deescalate, co-operation/cooperation, re-examine/reexamine, de-emphasize/deemphasize, and so on. Words often lose their hyphen as the become more common, e.g., email instead of e-mail. When there are tripled letters, the hyphenated variant of these words is often more common (as in shell-like instead of shelllike).

Closed-up style is avoided in some cases: possible homographs, such as recreation (fun or sport) versus re-creation (the act of creating again), retreat (turn back) versus re-treat (give therapy again), and un-ionized (not in ion form) versus unionized (organized into trade unions); combinations with proper nouns or adjectives (un-American, de-Stalinisation);[11][12] acronyms (anti-TNF antibody, non-SI units); or numbers (pre-1949 diplomacy, pre-1492 cartography). Although proto-oncogene is still hyphenated by both Dorland's and Merriam-Webster's Medical), the solid (that is, unhyphenated) styling (protooncogene) is a common variant, particularly among oncologists and geneticists.

A dieresis may also be used in a like fashion, either to separate and mark off monographs (as in coöperation) or to signalize a vocalic terminal e (for example, Brontë). This use of the dieresis peaked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but it was never applied extensively across the language: only a handful of diereses, including coöperation, and Brontë, are encountered with any appreciable frequency in English, thus seldom reëxamine, reïterate, deëmphasize. In borrowings from Modern French, whose orthography utilizes the dieresis as a means to differentiate graphemes, various English dictionaries list the dieresis as optional (as in naive and naïve) despite the juxtaposition of a and i.

Syllabification and spelling

Hyphens are occasionally used to denote syllabification, as in syl-la-bi-fi-ca-tion. Various British and North American dictionaries use an interpunct, sometimes called a "middle dot" or "hyphenation point", for this purpose, as in syl·la·bi·fi·ca·tion. This allows the hyphen to be reserved only for places where a hard hyphen is intended (for example, self-con·scious, un·self-con·scious, long-stand·ing). Similarly, hyphens may be used to indicate a word is being or should be spelled. For example, W-O-R-D spells "word".

In nineteenth-century American literature, hyphens were also used irregularly to divide syllables in words from indigenous North American languages, without regard for etymology or pronunciation:[13] e.g. "Shuh-shuh-gah" (from Ojibwe zhashagi, "blue heron") in The Song of Hiawatha.[14] This usage is now rare and proscribed, except in some place names such as Ah-gwah-ching.

Compound modifiers

Compound modifiers are groups of two or more words that jointly modify the meaning of another word. When a compound modifier other than an adverbadjective combination appears before a term, the compound modifier is often hyphenated to prevent misunderstanding, such as in American-football player or little-celebrated paintings. Without the hyphen, there is potential confusion about whether the writer means a "player of American football" or an "American player of football" and whether the writer means paintings that are "little celebrated" or "celebrated paintings" that are little.[15] Compound modifiers can extend to three or more words, as in ice-cream-flavored candy, and can be adverbial as well as adjectival (spine-tinglingly frightening). However, if the compound is a familiar one, it is usually unhyphenated. For example, some style guides prefer the construction high school students, to high-school students.[16][17] Although the expression is technically ambiguous ("students of a high school"/"school students who are high"), it would normally be formulated differently if other than the first meaning were intended. Noun–noun compound modifiers may also be written without a hyphen when no confusion is likely: grade point average and department store manager.[17]

When a compound modifier follows the term to which it applies, a hyphen is typically not used if the compound is a temporary compound. For example, "that gentleman is well respected", not "that gentleman is well-respected"; or "a patient-centered approach was used" but "the approach was patient centered."[18] But permanent compounds, found as headwords in dictionaries, are treated as invariable, so if they are hyphenated in the cited dictionary, the hyphenation will be used in both attributive and predicative positions. For example, "A cost-effective method was used" and "The method was cost-effective" (cost-effective is a permanent compound that is hyphenated as a headword in various dictionaries). When one of the parts of the modifier is a proper noun or a proper adjective, there is no hyphen (e.g., "a South American actor").[19]

When the first modifier in a compound is an adverb ending in -ly (e.g., "a poorly written novel"), various style guides advise no hyphen.[19] However, some do allow for this use. For example, The Economist Style Guide advises: "Adverbs do not need to be linked to participles or adjectives by hyphens in simple constructions ... Less common adverbs, including all those that end -ly, are less likely to need hyphens."[20] In the 19th century, it was common to hyphenate adverb–adjective modifiers with the adverb ending in -ly (e.g., "a craftily-constructed chair"). However, this has become rare. For example, wholly owned subsidiary and quickly moving vehicle are unambiguous, because the adverbs clearly modify the adjectives: "quickly" cannot modify "vehicle".

However, if an adverb can also function as an adjective, then a hyphen may be or should be used for clarity, depending on the style guide.[12] For example, the phrase more-important reasons ("reasons that are more important") is distinguished from more important reasons ("additional important reasons"), where more is an adjective. Similarly, more-beautiful scenery (with a mass-noun) is distinct from more beautiful scenery. (In contrast, the hyphen in "a more-important reason" is not necessary, because the syntax cannot be misinterpreted.) A few short and common words—such as well, ill, little, and much—attract special attention in this category.[20] The hyphen in "well-[past_participled] noun", such as in "well-differentiated cells", might reasonably be judged superfluous (the syntax is unlikely to be misinterpreted), yet plenty of style guides call for it. Because early has both adverbial and adjectival senses, its hyphenation can attract attention; some editors, due to comparison with advanced-stage disease and adult-onset disease, like the parallelism of early-stage disease and early-onset disease. Similarly, the hyphen in little-celebrated paintings clarifies that one is not speaking of little paintings.

Hyphens are usually used to connect numbers and words in modifying phrases. Such is the case when used to describe dimensional measurements of weight, size, and time, under the rationale that, like other compound modifiers, they take hyphens in attributive position (before the modified noun),[21] although not in predicative position (after the modified noun). This is applied whether numerals or words are used for the numbers. Thus 28-year-old woman and twenty-eight-year-old woman or 32-foot wingspan and thirty-two-foot wingspan, but the woman is 28 years old and a wingspan of 32 feet.[lower-alpha 1] However, with symbols for SI units (such as m or kg)—as opposed to the names of these units (such as metre or kilogram)—the numerical value is always separated from it with a space: a 25 kg sphere. When the unit names are spelled out, this recommendation does not apply: a 25-kilogram sphere, a roll of 35-millimetre film.[22]

In spelled-out fractions, hyphens are usually used when the fraction is used as an adjective but not when it is used as a noun: thus two-thirds majority[lower-alpha 1] and one-eighth portion but I drank two thirds of the bottle or I kept three quarters of it for myself.[23] However, at least one major style guide[21] hyphenates spelled-out fractions invariably (whether adjective or noun).

In English, an en dash, , sometimes replaces the hyphen in hyphenated compounds if either of its constituent parts is already hyphenated or contains a space (for example, San Francisco–area residents, hormone receptor–positive cells, cell cycle–related factors, and public-school–private-school rivalries).[24] A commonly used alternative style is the hyphenated string (hormone-receptor-positive cells, cell-cycle-related factors). (For other aspects of en dash–versus–hyphen use, see Dash § En dash.)

Object–verbal-noun compounds

When an object is compounded with a verbal noun, such as egg-beater (a tool that beats eggs), the result is sometimes hyphenated. Some authors do this consistently, others only for disambiguation; in this case, egg-beater, egg beater, and eggbeater are all common.

An example of an ambiguous phrase appears in they stood near a group of alien lovers, which without a hyphen implies that they stood near a group of lovers who were aliens; they stood near a group of alien-lovers clarifies that they stood near a group of people who loved aliens, as "alien" can be either an adjective or a noun. On the other hand, in the phrase a hungry pizza-lover, the hyphen will often be omitted (a hungry pizza lover), as "pizza" cannot be an adjective and the phrase is therefore unambiguous.

Similarly, there's a man-eating shark in these waters is nearly the opposite of there's a man eating shark at table 6; the first is a shark, and the second a man. A government-monitoring program is a program that monitors the government, whereas a government monitoring program is a government program that monitors something else.

Personal names

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 only the woman hyphenates her birth surname, appending her husband's surname.

With already-hyphenated names, some parts are typically dropped. For example, Aaron Johnson and Samantha Taylor-Wood became Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Sam Taylor-Johnson. Not all hyphenated surnames are the result of marriage. For example Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a descendant of Louis Lemlé Dreyfus whose son was Léopold Louis-Dreyfus.

Other compounds

Connecting hyphens are used in a large number of miscellaneous compounds, other than modifiers, such as in lily-of-the-valley, cock-a-hoop, clever-clever, tittle-tattle and orang-utan. Use is often dictated by convention rather than fixed rules, and hyphenation styles may vary between authors; for example, orang-utan is also written as orangutan or orang utan, and lily-of-the-valley may be hyphenated or not.

Suspended hyphens

A suspended hyphen (also called a suspensive hyphen or hanging hyphen, or less commonly a dangling or floating hyphen) may be used when a single base word is used with separate, consecutive, hyphenated words that are connected by "and", "or", or "to". For example, short-term and long-term plans may be written as short- and long-term plans. This usage is now common and specifically recommended in some style guides.[17] Suspended hyphens are also used, though less commonly, when the base word comes first, such as in "investor-owned and -operated". Uses such as "applied and sociolinguistics" (instead of "applied linguistics and sociolinguistics") are frowned upon; the Indiana University style guide uses this example and says "Do not 'take a shortcut' when the first expression is ordinarily open" (i.e., ordinarily two separate words).[17] This is different, however, from instances where prefixes that are normally closed up (styled solidly) are used suspensively. For example, preoperative and postoperative becomes pre- and postoperative (not pre- and post-operative) when suspended. Some editors prefer to avoid suspending such pairs, choosing instead to write out both words in full.[21]

Other uses

A hyphen may be used to connect groups of numbers, such as in dates (see below), telephone numbers or sports scores. It can also be used to indicate a range of values, although many styles prefer an en dash (see examples at Dash § En dash §§ Ranges of values).

The hyphen is sometimes used to hide letters in words (filleting for redaction or censoring), as in G-d, although an en dash can be used as well ("G–d").

The hyphen is often used in reduplicatives.

Varied meanings

Some stark examples of semantic changes caused by the placement of hyphens to mark attributive phrases:

  • Disease-causing poor nutrition is poor nutrition that causes disease.
  • Disease causing poor nutrition is a disease that causes poor nutrition.
  • A hard-working man is a man who works hard.
  • A hard working man is a working man who is tough.
  • A man-eating shark is a shark that eats humans.
  • A man eating shark is a man who is eating shark meat.
  • Three-hundred-year-old trees are an indeterminate number of trees that are each 300 years old.
  • Three hundred-year-old trees are three trees that are each 100 years old.
  • Three hundred year-old trees are 300 trees that are each a year old.

Origin and history

First page of the first volume: the epistle of St Jerome to Paulinus from the University of Texas copy. The page has 40 lines.

The first known documentation of the hyphen is in the grammatical works of Dionysius Thrax. At the time hyphenation was joining two words that would otherwise be read separately by a low tie mark between the two words.[25] In Greek these marks were known as enotikon, officially romanized as a hyphen.[26]

With the introduction of letter-spacing in the Middle Ages, the hyphen, still written beneath the text, reversed its meaning. Scribes used the mark to connect two words that had been incorrectly separated by a space. This era also saw the introduction of the marginal hyphen, for words broken across lines.[27]

The modern format of the hyphen originated with Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, c.1455 with the publication of his 42-line Bible. His tools did not allow for a sublinear hyphen, and he thus moved it to the middle of the line.[28] Examination of an original copy on vellum (Hubay index #35) in the U. S. Library of Congress shows that Gutenberg's movable type was set justified in a uniform style, 42 equal lines per page. The Gutenberg printing press required words made up of individual letters of type to be held in place by a surrounding 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 double hyphen appears throughout the Bible as a short, double line inclined to the right at a 60-degree angle:

In computing

Hyphen-minuses

In the ASCII character encoding, the hyphen is character 45. As Unicode is identical to ASCII (the 1967 version) for all encodings up to 127, the number 4510, i.e. 2D16, is assigned to this character in Unicode. As the character is also used as a minus sign, it is formally denoted U+002D - HYPHEN-MINUS. Unicode also encodes the minus and hyphen separately, as U+2212 and U+2010 respectively. However, as the Unicode hyphen is inconvenient to enter on most keyboards and the glyphs for the Unicode hyphen and the hyphen-minus are identical in most fonts (Lucida Sans Unicode is one of the few exceptions), use of the hyphen-minus as the hyphen character is very common. Even the Unicode Standard regularly uses the hyphen-minus rather than the Unicode hyphen.

The hyphen-minus has limited use in indicating subtraction; for example, compare 4+3−2=5 (minus) and 4+3-2=5 (hyphen-minus) — in most fonts the hyphen-minus will not have the optimal width, thickness, or vertical position, whereas the minus character will. Nevertheless, in applications like Microsoft Excel the hyphen-minus must be used to indicate subtraction, as use of the Unicode minus sign will produce an error.

The hyphen-minus is often used instead of dashes or minus signs in situations where the preferred characters are unavailable (such as ASCII-only text), where the preferred characters take effort to enter (via dialog boxes or multi-key, unmemorable keyboard shortcuts), or when the writer is unaware of the distinction. Some writers use two hyphen-minuses -- to represent an em dash in ASCII text.

The hyphen-minus character is also often used when specifying command-line options. The character is usually followed by one or more letters that indicate specific actions. Typically it is called a dash or switch in this context. Various implementations of the getopt function to parse command-line options additionally allow the use of two hyphen-minus characters, --, to specify long option names that are more descriptive than their single-letter equivalents. Another use of hyphens is that employed by programs written with pipelining in mind: a single hyphen may be recognized in lieu of a filename, with the hyphen then serving as an indicator that a standard stream, instead of a file, is to be worked with.

Soft and hard hyphens

Although software (hyphenation algorithms) can often automatically make decisions on when to hyphenate a word at a line break, it is also sometimes useful for the user to be able to insert cues for those decisions (which are dynamic in the online medium, given that text can be reflowed). For this purpose, the concept of a soft hyphen (discretionary hyphen, optional hyphen) was introduced, allowing such manual specification of a place where a hyphenated break is allowed but not forced. That is, it does not force a line break in an inconvenient place when the text is later reflowed.

Soft hyphens are inserted into the text at the positions where hyphenation may occur. It can be a tedious task to insert the soft hyphens by hand, and tools using hyphenation algorithms are available that do this automatically. Current modules of the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standard provide language-specific hyphenation dictionaries.

In contrast, a hyphen that is always displayed and printed is called a "hard hyphen". This can be a Unicode hyphen, a hyphen-minus, or a non-breaking hyphen (see below). Sometimes the term is limited to non-breaking hyphens.

Non-breaking hyphens

The non-breaking hyphen, nonbreaking hyphen, or no-break hyphen looks identical to the regular hyphen, but word processors treat it as a letter so that the hyphenated word will not be divided at the hyphen should this fall at what would be the end of a line of text; instead, either the whole hyphenated word will remain in full at the end of the line or it will go in full to the beginning of the next line. The non-breaking space exists for similar reasons.

The word segmentation rules of 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 (e.g. retreat and re‑treat would be indistinguishable with a line break after re), or in languages other than English (e.g., a line break at the hyphen in Irish an t‑athair or Romanian s‑a would be undesirable). The non-breaking hyphen addresses this need.

Usage in date notation

In parts of Europe and in India, the hyphen is used to delineate parts within a written date. Germans and Slavs also used Roman numerals for the month; 14‑VII‑1789 (14 July 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. Use 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 is also the typical date format used in large parts of Eastern Europe and Asia, although sometimes with other separators than the hyphen.

This method has gained influence within North America, as most common computer filesystems make the use of slashes difficult or impossible. DOS, OS/2 and Windows simultaneously support both \ and / as directory separators, but / is also used to introduce and separate switches to shell commands (unless reconfigured to use the hyphen-minus in DOS). 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. Apart from the separator used the non-year form of the date format is also identical to the standard American representation.

Unicode

Apart from dash and minus sign, Unicode has multiple hyphen characters:[29]

  • U+002D - HYPHEN-MINUS (HTML -), a character of multiple uses
  • U+00AD SOFT HYPHEN (HTML ­ · ­) (see note)
  • U+2010 HYPHEN (HTML ‐ · ‐, ‐)
  • U+2011 NON-BREAKING HYPHEN (HTML ‑)

Note: The SOFT HYPHEN serves as an invisible marker used to specify a place in text where a hyphenated break is allowed without forcing a line break in an inconvenient place if the text is reflowed. It becomes visible only after word wrapping at the end of a line.

And in non-Latin scripts:[29]

  • U+058A ֊ ARMENIAN HYPHEN (HTML ֊)
  • U+1806 MONGOLIAN TODO SOFT HYPHEN (HTML ᠆)
  • U+1B60 BALINESE PAMENENG (HTML ᭠) (used only as a line-breaking hyphen)
  • U+2E17 DOUBLE OBLIQUE HYPHEN (HTML ⸗) (used in ancient Near-Eastern linguistics and in blackletter typefaces)
  • U+05BE ־ HEBREW PUNCTUATION MAQAF (HTML ־) (used in Hebrew)
  • U+30FB KATAKANA MIDDLE DOT (HTML ・) (has the Unicode property of "Hyphen" despite its name)
  • U+FE63 SMALL HYPHEN-MINUS (HTML ﹣) (compatibility character for a small hyphen-minus, used in East Asian typography)
  • U+FF0D FULLWIDTH HYPHEN-MINUS (HTML -) (compatibility character for a wide hyphen-minus, used in East Asian typography)
  • U+FF65 HALFWIDTH KATAKANA MIDDLE DOT (HTML ・) (compatibility character for a wide katakana middle dot, has the Unicode property of "Hyphen" despite its name)

Unicode distinguishes the hyphen from the general interpunct. The characters below do not have the Unicode property of "Hyphen" despite their names:[29]

  • U+1400 CANADIAN SYLLABICS HYPHEN (HTML ᐀)
  • U+2027 HYPHENATION POINT (HTML ‧)
  • U+2043 HYPHEN BULLET (HTML ⁃ · ⁃)
  • U+2E1A HYPHEN WITH DIAERESIS (HTML ⸚)
  • U+2E40 DOUBLE HYPHEN (HTML ⹀)
  • U+30A0 KATAKANA-HIRAGANA DOUBLE HYPHEN (HTML ゠)
  • U+10EAD 𐺭 YEZIDI HYPHENATION MARK (HTML 𐺭)

(See interpunct and bullet (typography) for more round characters.)

See also

Notes

  1. With numbers greater than two, where a plural noun would normally be used in an unhyphenated predicative position, the singular form of the noun is generally used in the hyphenated form used attributively. Thus a woman who is 28 years old becomes a 28-year-old woman. There are occasional exceptions to this general rule, for instance with fractions (a two-thirds majority) and irregular plurals (a two-criteria review, a two-teeth bridge).

References

  1. "Hyphen Definition". dictionary.com. Retrieved 18 June 2015.
  2. ὑφέν. Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; A Greek–English Lexicon at the Perseus Project.
  3. Harper, Douglas. "hyphen". Online Etymology Dictionary.
  4. Wroe, Ann, ed. (2015). The Economist Style Guide (11th ed.). London / New York: Profile Books / PublicAffairs. p. 74. hyphens  There is no firm rule to help you decide which words are run together, hyphenated or left separate.
  5. "Small object of grammatical desire". BBC News. London: British Broadcasting Corporation. 20 September 2007..
  6. Gove, Philip Babcock (1993). Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged. Merriam-Webster. p. 14a, § 1.6.1. ISBN 978-0-87779-201-7. Retrieved 28 November 2014.
  7. Chambers, Allied (2006). The Chambers Dictionary. Allied Publishers. p. xxxviii, § 8. ISBN 978-8186062258. Retrieved 28 November 2014.
  8. Kromhout, Jan (2001). Afrikaans–English, English–Afrikaans Dictionary. Hippocrene Books. p. 182, § 5. ISBN 978-0-7818-0846-0. Retrieved 28 November 2014.
  9. Hartmann, R. Rf. K. (1986). The History of Lexicography: Papers from the Dictionary Research Centre Seminar at Exeter, March 1986. John Benjamins Publishing. p. 9. ISBN 978-9027245236.
  10. A fairly comprehensive list, although not exhaustive, is given at Prefix > List of English derivational prefixes.
  11. "Hyphenated Words: A Guide", The Grammar Curmudgeon, City slide.
  12. "Hyphens", Punctuation, Grammar book.
  13. Liberman, Mark. "American Indian Hyphens". Language Log.
  14. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. The Song of Hiawatha.
  15. Gary Blake and Robert W. Bly, The Elements of Technical Writing, p. 48. New York: Macmillan Publishers, 1993. ISBN 0020130856
  16. E.g. "H". Bloomberg School Style Manual. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Retrieved 9 March 2019.
  17. E.g. "H". The IU editorial style guide. Indiana University. Retrieved 9 March 2019.
  18. Davis, John (30 November 2004). "Using Hyphens in Compound Adjectives (and Exceptions to the Rule)" (Grammar tip). UHV. Archived from the original on 9 January 2010. Retrieved 5 January 2010.
  19. "Hyphenated Compound Words". englishplus.com. Retrieved 18 November 2014.
  20. Wroe, Ann, ed. (2015). The Economist Style Guide (11th ed.). London / New York: Profile Books / PublicAffairs. pp. 77–78. hyphens   ... 12. Adverbs: Adverbs do not need to be linked to participles or adjectives by hyphens in simple constructions [examples elided]. But if the adverb is one of two words together being used adjectivally, a hyphen may be needed [examples elided]. The hyphen is especially likely to be needed if the adverb is short and common, such as ill, little, much and well. Less common adverbs, including all those that end -ly, are less likely to need hyphens [example elided].
  21. Iverson, Cheryl, et al. (eds) (2007). "8.3.1". AMA Manual of Style (10th ed.). Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-517633-9.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
  22. Bureau international des poids et mesures, Le Système international d’unités (SI) / The International System of Units (SI), 9th ed. (Sèvres: 2019), ISBN 978-92-822-2272-0, sub§5.4.3, p. 149; "Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (SI)", NIST Special Publication 811, National Institute of Standards and Technology, March 2008.
  23. American Psychological Association (APA) (2010), The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.), Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, ISBN 978-1-4338-0562-2.
  24. Gary Lutz; Diane Stevenson (2005). The Writer's Digest grammar desk reference. Writer's Digest Books. p. 296. ISBN 978-1-58297-335-7.
  25. Nicolas, Nick. "Greek Unicode Issues: Punctuation Archived 6 August 2012 at Archive.today". 2005. Accessed 7 October 2014.
  26. Ελληνικός Οργανισμός Τυποποίησης [Ellīnikós Organismós Typopoíīsīs, "Hellenic Organization for Standardization"]. ΕΛΟΤ 743, 2η Έκδοση [ELOT 743, 2ī Ekdosī, "ELOT 743, 2nd ed."]. ELOT (Athens), 2001. (in Greek)
  27. Keith Houston (2013). Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 121. ISBN 978-0-393-06442-1.
  28. Keith Houston (2013). Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 132. ISBN 978-0-393-06442-1.
  29. "Unicode 13.0 UCD: PropList.txt". 27 November 2019. Retrieved 17 March 2020.
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