A hyphen ( -, or ‐ ) is a punctuation mark. It is used both to join words and to separate syllables. It is often confused with a dash ( –, —, ― ), which is longer. Hyphenation is the use of hyphens. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Traditionally, the hyphen has been used in several ways: ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ - Nouns formed of two nouns, or a noun and an adjective, are sometimes hyphenated, as blue-blood. (See also Hyphenated American.)
- Except for noun-noun and adverb-adjective compound modifiers, when a compound modifier appears before a term, the compound modifier is generally hyphenated in order to prevent any possible misunderstanding, such as light-blue paint, twentieth-century invention, cold-hearted person, and award-winning show. Without the hyphens, there is potential confusion about whether 'light' applies to 'blue' or 'paint', whether 'twentieth' applies to 'century' or 'invention', etc. Hyphens are generally not used in noun-noun or adverb-adjective compound modifiers, because no such confusion is possible; for example:
- government standards organization and department store manager
- wholly owned subsidiary and quickly moving vehicle
- Hyphenation is also common with adjective-noun compound modifiers, but arguably less generally. For example, real-world example; left-hand drive. 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 twenty-three. (The and is generally included in British English but often omitted in American English.)
- Hyphens are occasionally used to denote syllabification, as in syl-lab-i-fi-ca-tion. In most dictionaries, a middle dot, sometimes called a "hyphenation point", is used for this purpose, as in syl?lab?i?fi?ca?tion.
- If a word beginning on one line of text continues into the following line, a hyphen will usually be inserted immediately before the split. Note that the details of doing this properly are complex and language-dependent, and interact with other typesetting practices: see justification and hyphenation algorithm.
- Some married couples compose a new surname for their new family by combining their two surnames together with a hyphen in between. Jane Doe and John Smith might become Jane and John Smith-Doe, for instance. More often, however, only the woman hyphenates her birth surname with her husband's surname.
However, 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 advertising copy or labels on packaging, since they are often more concerned with visual cleanliness than semantic clarity. However, it is still used in most newspapers and magazines, so people remain accustomed to seeing and understanding it. Most writers who are obstreperous about other things are compliant when editors tell them to hyphenate compounds.
Punctuation: Punctuation marks are written symbols that do not correspond to either phonemes (sounds) of a spoken language nor to lexemes (words and phrases) of a written language, but which serve to organize or clarify written language. See orthography.... Dash: A dash is a punctuation mark, and is not to be confused with the hyphen, which has quite different uses....
|
|