| Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993. |
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| HYPHEN |
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| This is the mark (-) English uses to link the parts of some compound words (drug-dependent, blow-dry), including most of those containing prepositions (mother-in-law, top-of-the-line); to combine single-word proper nouns such as place names (the London-Paris flight, although in printed matter the New York–London flight and the Saint-Lambert–Montreal route, will look slightly different, because printing uses the en dash to form compounds when one or both of the words are made up of two words or are already hyphenated); to put between some prefixes and the root words to which they’re joined (non-Christian, self-destruct, pre-Columbian); to avoid ambiguity in compound modifiers (blue-green enamel, a slow-moving van, but a slowly moving van, because -ly adverbs and the adjectives they modify are not hyphenated); to use between parts of fractions as these are spelled out, especially as modifiers (a three-fourths majority); to mean “up to and including” when used between numbers or dates (50–59, 1922–1930, although here Edited English requires en dashes); to divide elements of compound two-digit numbers over twenty (twenty-one, ninety-nine). Note that even if you use a hyphen between parts of an adjective or adverb (an eighteenth-century statesman), you should not do so in a modifier plus a noun (She lived in the eighteenth century). | 1 |
| The hyphen’s other main use is to link the parts of a word divided for lack of space at the end of a line of writing; in this use the hyphen appears at the end of the last syllable for which there is room on that line, with the rest of the word then appearing at the beginning of the next line. Good desk dictionaries show you where words may conventionally be divided, usually with a dot or space between syllables where a hyphen may go. Generally editors try to avoid hyphenating any word at the end of a line when the word already has a hyphen in it. But see PUNCTUATION. | 2 |
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| | | The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. Copyright © 1993 Columbia University Press. |
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