how to spell: Hyphens

howtospell.co.uk/punctuation-guide-workbook
Hyphens ‘glue’ words together to make new words/compound words for
Compound nouns: a wheeler-dealer, some make-up, my mother-in-law...
Compound adjectives: a state-of-the-art phone, a good-looking man, a bad-tempered dog, a thirty-four-year-old car...
Compound verbs: to re-enter, to dry-clean, to freeze-dry, to test-drive...

The Oxford Dictionary says that a hyphen tells the reader
that certain words go together, it helps clarify meaning and
indicates that the joined up words have a combined meaning,
for example: a pick-me-up, mother-in-law, good-hearted.

The basic functions of the hyphen are:
- To link and glue two or more words together to create a new word.
- To remove potential confusion (re-cover something/recover from an illness
semi-illiterate (semiilliterate x), de-ice (deice x)

Use a hyphen to link a relationship term:
sister-in-law, mother-in-law, father-in-law, brother-in-law,
great-grandmother, great-aunt, great-grandchild, ex-wife…

Plurals: sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law, mothers-in-law…

But: stepmother, stepfather, stepdaughter, stepson, stepchild.

- To help with pronunciation (go-getters (gogetters), co-respondent,(corespondent), get-at-able) getattable

Prefixes such as re-, co-, pre,anti-, self- sometimes have hyphens when added to words but sometimes they don't. - no rules and as we'll see later hyphens come and go in words.

co-owner / coexist
pre-war / preview
anti-hero / antibiotic
self-assured / selfsame
sub-branch / subcontinent
up-market / upbeat
off-Broadway / offbeat

We add a hyphen when a prefix comes before a capital letter, a proper noun, because a capital letter can’t appear inside a word: mid-July, pro-European, post-Vietnam, un-American, pro-Arab, anti-Reagan, off-Broadway...

For single letter prefixes, most have hyphens:
X-ray, X-rated, X-certificate, A-list, T-shirt, T-junction/T-intersection, T-bone, Y-chromosome, U-turn… Notice the single letter is a capital.

But we don’t need to use hyphens in every type of compound word. The rules are flexible as we'll see.

e-book or ebook
e-mail or email
multi-storeyor multistorey
anticlockwise or anti-clockwise

They're all correct. You'll see all these forms in dictionaries and newspapers. Hyphens have always been in a state of flux, forever changing.

We usually place hyphens in new words to help the reader, then over time the hyphen is dropped.

In the early 20th century we had: to-day, to-morrow yester-day with hyphens. We definitely don't use hyphens with these words now: today, tomorrow, yesterday.

In the 50s: motor-car, tax-payer, man-power
Now: motorcar, taxpayer, manpower.


In recent times:
electronic mail to e-mail to email (or e-mail)
electronic book to e-book to ebook (or e-book)
on line to on-line to online

This process used to take decades, but now new words undergo this transformation in years.

Using hyphens to create new words has been going on for centuries.

This is such a big subject, so go into more detail in my Punctuation Guide & Workbook - check it out here howtospell.co.uk/punctuation-guide-workbook