The Hyphen – How to use it and why

Aug 13th, 2008 | By John Roach | Category: Grammar

Everyone knows how to use hyphens, right? No. In fact, there’s not even a good grammar rule about their usage, much less a general consensus.

What is a hyphen?

This is a hyphen

-

It is readily available on your keyboard, which is handy.

In general, hyphens are used on the word level; they attach prefixes to words, or join two words together. They do not mark off phrases and clauses. That’s a role reserved for em dashes.

Some examples:

Eighth-grader John was not a pleasant child.

Spammers have co-opted blogging.

Using hyphens to form compound adjectives

The first example above, about how nasty children can be, uses a compound adjective. In it, the word eighth does not modify John, it modifies grade. Without the hyphen, we would read that John was both an eighth and a grader. With proper hyphen usage, we realize that John was in the eighth grade.

When the phrase is sufficiently well known, you drop the hyphen. Well known being relative, of course. If you’re writing for the general public, err on the side of caution; for niche audiences, however, you can assume more familiarity.

If you have a series of words that use the same base but different prefixes, you write just the prefix and a hyphen until the last word.

The seventh- and eighth-graders did well on the test.

Because of the uneven economy, many freelancers alternate between being under- and overworked.

However, do not use a hyphen with very or an adverb ending in –ly.

Also, most compound adjectives do not take an adjective when they appear after the word they are modifying. So

The well-read man …

becomes

The man who is well read …

Using hyphens with prefixes

Here’s where it gets tricky: You use hyphens to slap on a prefix – sometimes. The best part is that there’s not really a rule for it, you just have to memorize them. Here are a couple of guidelines, though

When a letter would be doubled or tripled in an ugly manner

Re-elect and co-opt, but rerun and codependence

When the prefix + base is spelled the same as another word

Re-cover and recover

The death of the hyphen

Back in the good old days, when men where men and most everybody was illiterate, you found hyphens everywhere. Would you believe that tomorrow used to be hyphenated? Yep, it used to be written to-morrow. Send me enough money for an OED subscription and I could probably tell you why.

Today, however, hyphens are being used less and less. Prefixes are being slammed up against words without the least bit of concern for personal space and phrases are being split up with a cold, awkward space between them.

Fowler’s even goes so far as to recommend recasting your sentence to avoid hyphenation. So the schoolboy example above would become

John was not a pleasant child when he was in the eighth grade.

Why is this? Because punctuation in general is being used less. It is now advised to use punctuation marks only to avoid confusion and to leave them out for other considerations (such as rhythm, for example). This can be seen as a shift from author-centric writing to reader-centric. Or perhaps ink’s just getting more expensive. Who knows?

All of this ignores hyphenating words at the end of a line, as that it an entirely different usage.