Hyphenated vs un-hyphenated words

They haven't been banned, but they wax and wane in popularity. There used to be a progression from two words being a common pair to them being receiving a hyphen, and eventually they might become united as a compound word, but that does seem to have broken down. Personally, I don't believe spellcheckers, so I would hyphenate, if I were som inclined, but I have found that I have generally gotten rid of them.

One reason for them going is that when someone does a justified layout and later changes the manuscript the hyphens of words that were split remain even though the words are no longer in that position, so all hyphenated words look wrong.

There are some words that are still hyphenated. I wish they weren't. They seem like they should be one word, but when I research them lo and behold --

Yeah, "highschool." (Mentioned by Maryn.) Two separate words? Really ?!

Yeah, I agree; some words just don't look right without a hyphen. I think we've gone overboard a bit with some of the ones we've removed. But, as Maryn says, our language is changing all the time, whether we want it to or not. I'm waiting for text speak words to be added to the dictionary. Might have to move to a new planet when things like "thx" become accepted spelling.

I can't believe someone complained about having to read a book with hyphens in it, wow. Surely they must have had more than one complaint though...would they pull a book from just one complaint?

Infuriating

Belinda Rees said:

Yeah, I agree; some words just don't look right without a hyphen. I think we've gone overboard a bit with some of the ones we've removed. But, as Maryn says, our language is changing all the time, whether we want it to or not. I'm waiting for text speak words to be added to the dictionary. Might have to move to a new planet when things like "thx" become accepted spelling.

I can't believe someone complained about having to read a book with hyphens in it, wow. Surely they must have had more than one complaint though...would they pull a book from just one complaint?

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And I can't believe Amazon responded to the complaint(s) and "suppressed the book". They don't suppress all those damn novels with multitudes of misspellings and atrocious grammar!

I am furious for the author!

Yeah, the Farmer's Co-op in my hometown would become the Farmer's Coop--a completely different image.

I'm also one who misreads coworker.

The one I wonder about is why some Brits need to hyphenate no-one. Other than the guy on Herman's Hermits, is there a danger in spelling it "Noone"?

Chase, no-one who minds hyphenation

Or a type-writer was the one who operated the type-writing machine.

Or, as we refer to them now, a typist using a typewriter.

My first day in college, a professor said there were no words in the English language that form a new word by adding "non" without a hyphen. I told him that was nonsense, and he thought a second and second, "There's only one word in the English language that forms a new word by adding "non" without a hyphen."

Times have changed. The firs word I saw lose it's hyphen was "nonfiction", though an unusually high number of writers on this forum still stick the hyphen in there. Don't know why. It hasn't been used in decades.

Hyphens do sometimes make sense, but just as often, maybe more so, they're completely unnecessary, and should be dropped.

Gunshot has a long history, but there is no way in hell I will ever write "high school" as one word.

Jamesaritchie said:

but there is no way in h*ll I will ever write "high school" as one word.

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I wouldn't either. But I do want to. It just seems like it should be one word.

In time to come it may well be, one word. Then you will have no choice but to write it that way ;-)

Over the past century-plus there has been an evolution in the use of hyphenation in written English. If you look at many 19th-century novels, you'll see today and tomorrow, rendered as to-day and to-morrow, as just two examples. In general, however, a compound word, expressed as a single concept, should either be hyphenated, or rendered as a single combined word. Among such, common usage varies a bit. You'll certainly want to hyphenate something like mother-in-law. To be precise, you'd probably want to hyphenate second-cousin, if you were referring to the familial relationship, but to render it as second cousin, if you were writing about two different cousins.

The purpose of hyphenation is to make it clear that the conjoined words refer to a specific single thing. The issue is clarity.

caw

Ken said:

I wouldn't either. But I do want to. It just seems like it should be one word.

In time to come it may well be, one word. Then you will have no choice but to write it that way ;-)

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It's not one word? Wait a minute. I've seen it written that way. Yes, I have.

I use co-workers. Cow orkers are a possible, but unhelpful reading of coworkers. Ditto: Bigender. Big ender is some one who either lives at the larger end of an island, town or state, or is callipygian. Bi-gender.

Compound words have evolved over time, and the tendency is to drop the hyphenation. Good examples of this are the common words today and tomorrow. Back in the 19th century, these were commonly rendered as to-day and to-morrow.

The key matter with compound words is that they be connected, to signify to the reader that they represent a single concept. If in doubt, hyphenate, for clarity.

caw

WriteMinded said:

It's not one word? Wait a minute. I've seen it written that way. Yes, I have.

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Chase said:

The one I wonder about is why some Brits need to hyphenate no-one. Other than the guy on Herman's Hermits, is there a danger in spelling it "Noone"?

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Noooooooooooone looks bloody odd to me. A lovely hyphen solves that problem and stops me reading "noon" (to rhyme with names like Moone and Doone).


I am fond of hyphens used to form (overly-long) compound words for comic effect, which Pratchett does rather well:

This is a story about magic and where it goes and perhaps more importantly where it comes from and why, although it doesn't pretend to answer all or any of these questions.

It may, however, help to explain why Gandalf never got married and why Merlin was a man. Because this is also a story about sex, although probably not in the athletic, tumbling, count-the-legs-and-divide-by-two sense unless the characters get totally beyond the author's control. They might.

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I also rather like hanging hyphens used for prefixes, e.g. "pro- and anti-punctuation movement".

So, uh, hands off me hyphens.

I don't think I've seen "no-one" not hyphenated. Separated, yes, but "noone" is just annoying.

If you don't want to use a hyphen, there's always a diaeresis: noöne...

There may be more to this story than meets the eye. Here's the author's blog...

https://graemereynolds.wordpress.co...-when-amazon-went-to-war-against-punctuation/

If you scroll down to the comments you'll find a couple of people commenting that the complaint could have come from a blind reader for whom the text is not converting properly. It seems that the author may have accidentally been using a non-standard character instead of a hyphen.

The author has since fixed the problem. The book is back on sale.

I suspect that there was more to this than is apparent. The note from KDP mentions "serious errors", and whether to hyphenate is not usually an error; it is a matter of style. The book that I put through there came back with one error that was quite minor, so I wonder whether there were other issues.

juniper said:

I seem to remember dozens of years ago when I was a kid, many words were hyphenated that aren't now.

Sadly, the only one that springs to mind right now is co-operation.

I think there were also some re-(something) words. Re-worked, perhaps, or something similar.

Now words are all smashed together. The hyphens made sense, both grammatically and phonetically. Co-(something) meaning something shared. The hyphen set off the first syllable for pronunciation.

This article says it's a British vs American English thing, although I grew up with American English and clearly remember co-operate. http://grammarist.com/spelling/cooperate-co-operate/

When did hyphens disappear in America?

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blacbird mentioned this, they go away over time and as the hyphenated word becomes more popular/common. I remember in the late 1970s I was on one of the few "forums" on a mainframe (was that once main-frame?) dialup (dial-up? Firefox's spell checker objects to dialup) computer, We discussed, among other things, electronic mail. The shorthand for this was (or perhaps became, a decade or so later) e-mail, and about 15 years ago I got tired of using the dash and typed email, well before many others caught up.

So as a compound word becomes more common, it tends to become just an ordinary word.

Similarly, LASER was an acronym (a WORD made of the first letters of other words, as opposed to an initialism which is a similarly-made but unpronounceable string of letters such as FBI and ASPCA), but the word acronym now covers things that used to be initialisms (and the word initialism has fallen out of favor).

Furthermore, acronyms (the ones from the original meaning) are no longer all upper case (or capitals) as they originally were, as in laser but not LASER, but initialisms (which are now called acronyms) are still upper case, as again, FBI and ASPCA.

PETA is a pronounceable initialism and thus an acronym in the original meaning, but it's still all upper case. In many ways, PETA is a strange one.

Maryn said:

That's the thing about a living language--it changes all the time, whether we want it to remain the written language of our learning years or not.

The closing of words as their combined use becomes more and more common is among the changes. Motor cycle becomes motor-cycle which in turn morphs into motorcycle. About the only ones immune to closure are those that become unwieldy, like highschool and gunsshot, both of which make my reader's eye bulge in a most unseemly way.

What I try to do it pick a single current dictionary and follow its listing for whether it's still two words, a hyphenate, or is now fully closed. Merriam Webster online is just fine, and free.

Maryn, amused at old books containing to-morrow

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It's bad enough that words and their meanings change over time (spiritual used to mean religious, but then there's this spiritual-but-not-religious movement, and now Sam Harris has this book out about being spiritual without God!).

But also THE RULES OF THE LANGUAGE ARE CHANGING! And no, I'm not talking about rules like when to use a dash. I'm talking about something I was severely warned against in both elementary and high school (yeah, it was two words for many decades, and before the advent of "middleschool"), and it was as bad as a misspelled word, if not worse.

Yes, that's right. Sentence fragments. [Irony Intentional] Sentence fragments used to be an error, and not just any kind of error, but an UNACCEPTABLE error. You'd get points taken off a paper for a single sentence fragment, but now I see them everywhere.

But this explains why I could hardly read a single word of Beowulf.

WriterBN said:

I don't think I've seen "no-one" not hyphenated. Separated, yes, but "noone" is just annoying.

If you don't want to use a hyphen, there's always a diaeresis: noöne...

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A what? That's not in the original 7-bit ASCII character set! How do I get that on my ASR-33?

Is it stone-circles or stone circles? (stonecircles??)
road-markes or road markers? (roadmarkers?)

Susan Anwin said:

Is it stone-circles or stone circles? (stonecircles??)
road-markes or road markers? (roadmarkers?)

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Yes, it is one or another of each pair. Actually, all three possibilities are in play, and I don't think any is wrong:
road markers", "road-markers", or "roadmarkers", regardless of what any spell checker may think.

Susan Anwin said:

Is it stone-circles or stone circles? (stonecircles??)
road-markes or road markers? (roadmarkers?)

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Dunno. It's a headache, isn't it? Or maybe a head ache or a head-ache. Anyway, this morning — or is it thismorning — I've got one.