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The hyphen is a
punctuation Punctuation (or sometimes interpunction) is the use of spacing, conventional signs (called punctuation marks), and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and correct reading of written text, whether read silently or aloud. A ...
mark used to join words and to separate
syllable A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological ...
s of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. ''Son-in-law'' is an example of a hyphenated word. The hyphen is sometimes confused with
dash The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the endash , generally longer than the hyphen ...
es ( figure dash , en dash , em dash , horizontal bar ), which are longer and have different uses, or with the
minus sign The plus and minus signs, and , are mathematical symbols used to represent the notions of positive and negative, respectively. In addition, represents the operation of addition, which results in a sum, while represents subtraction, resul ...
, which is also longer and more vertically centred in some
typeface A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font. There are thousands o ...
s. Although hyphens are not to be confused with en dashes, there are some overlaps in
usage The usage of a language is the ways in which its written and spoken variations are routinely employed by its speakers; that is, it refers to "the collective habits of a language's native speakers", as opposed to idealized models of how a languag ...
(in which either a hyphen or an en dash may be acceptable, depending on user preference, as discussed below). In addition, the hyphen often substitutes for the en dash elsewhere in informal writing. As an orthographic concept, the hyphen is a single entity. In terms of
character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...
and display, it is represented by any of several characters and glyphs, including the
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
hyphen (shown at the top of the infobox on this page), the hyphen-minus, the soft (optional) hyphen, and the non-breaking hyphen. The character most often used to represent a hyphen is called the "hyphen-minus" by Unicode, deriving from the original
ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...
standard, where it was called "hyphen(minus)".


Etymology

The word is derived from Ancient Greek (), contracted from (), "in one" (literally "under one"). An () was an undertie-like sign written below two adjacent letters to indicate that they belong to the same word when it was necessary to avoid ambiguity, before
word spacing Word spacing in typography is space between words, as contrasted with letter-spacing (space between letters of words) and sentence spacing (space between sentences). Typographers may modify the spacing of letters or words in a body of type to aid ...
was practiced.


Use in English

The
English language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the ...
does not have definitive hyphenation rules, though various
style guide A style guide or manual of style is a set of standards for the writing, formatting, and design of documents. It is often called a style sheet, although that term also has multiple other meanings. The standards can be applied either for gene ...
s provide detailed usage recommendations and have a significant amount of overlap in what they advise. Hyphens are mostly used to break single words into parts or to join ordinarily separate words into single words. Spaces are not placed between a hyphen and either of the elements it connects except when using a suspended or "hanging" hyphen that stands in for a repeated word (e.g., ''nineteenth- and writers''). Style conventions that apply to hyphens (and dashes) have evolved to support ease of reading in complex constructions; editors often accept deviations if they aid rather than hinder easy comprehension. The use of the hyphen in English compound nouns and verbs has, in general, been steadily declining. Compounds that might once have been hyphenated are increasingly left with spaces or are combined into one word. Reflecting this changing usage, in 2007, the sixth edition of the '' Shorter Oxford English Dictionary'' removed the hyphens from 16,000 entries, such as ''fig-leaf'' (now ''fig leaf''), ''pot-belly'' (now ''pot belly''), and ''pigeon-hole'' (now ''pigeonhole''). The increasing prevalence of computer technology and the advent of the Internet have given rise to a subset of common nouns that might have been hyphenated in the past (e.g., '' toolbar'', '' hyperlink'', and ''
pastebin A pastebin or text storage site is a type of online content-hosting service where users can store plain text (e.g. source code snippets for code review via Internet Relay Chat (IRC)). The first pastebin was the eponymous pastebin.com. Other s ...
''). Despite decreased use, hyphenation remains the norm in certain compound-modifier constructions and, among some authors, with certain prefixes (see below). Hyphenation is also routinely used as part of syllabification in justified texts to avoid unsightly spacing (especially in columns with narrow
line length In typography, line length is the width of a block of typeset text, usually measured in units of length like inches or points or in characters per line (in which case it is a measure). A block of text or paragraph has a maximum line length t ...
s, as when used with
newspaper A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business, spor ...
s).


Separating


Justification and line-wrapping

When flowing text, it is sometimes preferable to break a word into two so that it continues on another line rather than moving the entire word to the next line. The word may be divided at the nearest break point between syllables ( syllabification) and a hyphen inserted to indicate that the letters form a word fragment, rather than a full word. This allows more efficient use of paper, allows flush appearance of right-side margins ( justification) without oddly large word spaces, and decreases the problem of rivers. This kind of hyphenation is most useful when the width of the column (called the "line length" in typography) is very narrow. For example: Rules (or guidelines) for correct hyphenation vary between languages, and may be complex, and they can interact with other orthographic and typesetting practices. Hyphenation algorithms, when employed in concert with dictionaries, are sufficient for all but the most formal texts. It may be necessary to distinguish an incidental line-break hyphen from one integral to a word being mentioned (as when used in a dictionary) or present in an original text being quoted (when in a critical edition), not only to control its word wrap behavior (which encoding handles with hard and soft hyphens having the same glyph) but also to differentiate appearance (with a different glyph). '' Webster's Third New International Dictionary'' and the '' Chambers Dictionary'' use a
double hyphen In Latin script, the double hyphen is a punctuation mark that consists of two parallel hyphens. It was a development of the earlier , which developed from a Central European variant of the virgule slash, originally a form of scratch comma. S ...
for integral hyphens and a single hyphen for line-breaks, whereas Kromhout's Afrikaans–English dictionary uses the opposite convention. The ''
Concise Oxford Dictionary The ''Concise Oxford English Dictionary'' (officially titled ''The Concise Oxford Dictionary'' until 2002, and widely abbreviated ''COD'' or ''COED'') is probably the best-known of the 'smaller' Oxford dictionaries. The latest edition contains ...
(fifth edition)'' suggested repeating an integral hyphen at the start of the following line.


Prefixes and suffixes

Prefixes (such as ''de-'', ''pre-'', ''re-'', and ''non-''A fairly comprehensive list, although not exhaustive, is given at Prefix > List of English derivational prefixes.) and
suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carr ...
es (such as ', ', ', and ') are sometimes hyphenated, especially when the unhyphenated spelling resembles another word or when the affixation is deemed misinterpretable, ambiguous, or somehow "odd-looking" (for example, having two consecutive monographs that look like the digraphs of English, like e+a, e+e, or e+i). However, the unhyphenated style, which is also called ''closed up'' or ''solid'', is usually preferred, particularly when the
derivative In mathematics, the derivative of a function of a real variable measures the sensitivity to change of the function value (output value) with respect to a change in its argument (input value). Derivatives are a fundamental tool of calculus. ...
has been relatively familiarized or popularized through extensive use in various contexts. As a rule of thumb, affixes are not hyphenated unless the lack of a hyphen would hurt clarity. The hyphen may be used between vowel letters (e.g., ''ee'', ''ea'', ''ei'') to indicate that they do not form a digraph. Some words have both hyphenated and unhyphenated variants: ''/deescalate'', ''/cooperation'', ''/reexamine'', ''/deemphasize'', and so on. Words often lose their hyphen as they become more common, such as ''
email Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" mean ...
'' instead of '. When there are tripled letters, the hyphenated variant of these words is often more common (as in ' instead of ''shelllike''). Closed-up style is avoided in some cases: possible
homograph A homograph (from the el, ὁμός, ''homós'', "same" and γράφω, ''gráphō'', "write") is a word that shares the same written form as another word but has a different meaning. However, some dictionaries insist that the words must also ...
s, such as '' recreation'' (fun or sport) versus ' (the act of creating again), ''retreat'' (turn back) versus ' (give
therapy A therapy or medical treatment (often abbreviated tx, Tx, or Tx) is the attempted remediation of a health problem, usually following a medical diagnosis. As a rule, each therapy has indications and contraindications. There are many differe ...
again), and ' (not in ion form) versus ''unionized'' (organized into
trade union A trade union (labor union in American English), often simply referred to as a union, is an organization of workers intent on "maintaining or improving the conditions of their employment", ch. I such as attaining better wages and benefits ...
s); combinations with proper nouns or adjectives (', ');.
acronym An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in ''NATO'' (''North Atlantic Treaty Organization''), but sometimes use syllables, as ...
s (', '); or numbers (', '). Although ' is still hyphenated by both ''Dorland's'' and ''Merriam-Webster's Medical'', the solid (that is, unhyphenated) styling (''protooncogene'') is a common variant, particularly among oncologists and geneticists. A diaeresis may also be used in a like fashion, either to separate and mark off monographs (as in ''coöperation'') or to signalize a
vocalic A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...
terminal e (for example, '' Brontë''). This use of the diaeresis peaked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but it was never applied extensively across the language: only a handful of diaereses, including ''coöperation'' and ''Brontë'', are encountered with any appreciable frequency in English; thus ''reëxamine'', ''reïterate'', ''deëmphasize'', etc. are seldom encountered. In borrowings from Modern French, whose orthography utilizes the diaeresis as a means to differentiate
grapheme In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called '' graphemi ...
s, various English dictionaries list the dieresis as optional (as in ''naive'' and ''naïve'') despite the juxtaposition of a and i.


Syllabification and spelling

Hyphens are occasionally used to denote syllabification, as in ''syl-la-bi-fi-ca-tion''. Various British and North American dictionaries use an interpunct, sometimes called a "middle dot" or "hyphenation point", for this purpose, as in ''syl·la·bi·fi·ca·tion''. This allows the hyphen to be reserved only for places where a hard hyphen is intended (for example, ', ', '). Similarly, hyphens may be used to indicate how a word is being or should be spelled. For example, ''W-O-R-D spells "word"''. In nineteenth-century American literature, hyphens were also used irregularly to divide syllables in words from indigenous North American languages, without regard for etymology or pronunciation, such as "Shuh-shuh-gah" (from
Ojibwe The Ojibwe, Ojibwa, Chippewa, or Saulteaux are an Anishinaabe people in what is currently southern Canada, the northern Midwestern United States, and Northern Plains. According to the U.S. census, in the United States Ojibwe people are one of ...
''zhashagi'', "blue heron") in ''
The Song of Hiawatha ''The Song of Hiawatha'' is an 1855 epic poem in trochaic tetrameter by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow which features Native American characters. The epic relates the fictional adventures of an Ojibwe warrior named Hiawatha and the tragedy of hi ...
''. This usage is now rare and proscribed, except in some place names such as Ah-gwah-ching.


Joining


Compound modifiers

Compound modifier A compound modifier (also called a compound adjective, phrasal adjective, or adjectival phrase) is a compound of two or more attributive words: that is, two or more words that collectively modify a noun. Compound modifiers are grammatically equival ...
s are groups of two or more words that jointly modify the meaning of another word. When a compound modifier other than an
adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...
adjective In linguistics, an adjective ( abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ...
combination appears ''before'' a term, the compound modifier is often hyphenated to prevent misunderstanding, such as in '' player'' or '' paintings''. Without the hyphen, there is potential confusion about whether the writer means a "player of American football" or an "American player of football" and whether the writer means paintings that are "little celebrated" or "celebrated paintings" that are little. Compound modifiers can extend to three or more words, as in '' candy'', and can be adverbial as well as adjectival ('' frightening''). However, if the compound is a familiar one, it is usually unhyphenated. For example, some style guides prefer the construction ''high school students'', to '' students''. Although the expression is technically ambiguous ("students of a high school"/"school students who are high"), it would normally be formulated differently if other than the first meaning were intended. Noun–noun compound modifiers may also be written without a hyphen when no confusion is likely: ''grade point average'' and ''department store manager''. When a compound modifier ''follows'' the term to which it applies, a hyphen is typically not used if the compound is a temporary compound. For example, "that gentleman is well respected", not "that gentleman is well-respected"; or "a patient-centered approach was used" but "the approach was patient centered." But permanent compounds, found as headwords in dictionaries, are treated as invariable, so if they are hyphenated in the cited dictionary, the hyphenation will be used in both attributive and predicative positions. For example, "A cost-effective method was used" and "The method was cost-effective" (''cost-effective'' is a permanent compound that is hyphenated as a headword in various dictionaries). When one of the parts of the modifier is a proper noun or a
proper adjective English orthography sometimes uses the term proper adjective to mean adjectives that take initial capital letters, and common adjective to mean those that do not. For example, a person from India is Indian—''Indian'' is a proper adjective. Etymo ...
, there is no hyphen (e.g., "a South American actor"). When the first modifier in a compound is an adverb ending in ''-ly'' (e.g., "a poorly written novel"), various style guides advise no hyphen. However, some do allow for this use. For example, ''
The Economist ''The Economist'' is a British weekly newspaper printed in demitab format and published digitally. It focuses on current affairs, international business, politics, technology, and culture. Based in London, the newspaper is owned by The Eco ...
Style Guide'' advises: "Adverbs do not need to be linked to participles or adjectives by hyphens in simple constructions... Less common adverbs, including all those that end ''-ly'', are less likely to need hyphens." In the 19th century, it was common to hyphenate adverb–adjective modifiers with the adverb ending in ''-ly'' (e.g., "a craftily-constructed chair"). However, this has become rare. For example, ''wholly owned subsidiary'' and ''quickly moving vehicle'' are unambiguous, because the adverbs clearly modify the adjectives: "quickly" cannot modify "vehicle". However, if an adverb can also function as an adjective, then a hyphen may be or should be used for clarity, depending on the style guide. For example, the phrase '' reasons'' ("reasons that are more important") is distinguished from ''more important reasons'' ("additional important reasons"), where ''more'' is an adjective. Similarly, '' scenery'' (with a mass-noun) is distinct from ''more beautiful scenery''. (In contrast, the hyphen in "a reason" is not necessary, because the syntax cannot be misinterpreted.) A few short and common words—such as ''well'', ''ill'', ''little'', and ''much''—attract special attention in this category. The hyphen in "well- ast_participlednoun", such as in " well-differentiated cells", might reasonably be judged superfluous (the syntax is unlikely to be misinterpreted), yet plenty of style guides call for it. Because ''early'' has both adverbial and adjectival senses, its hyphenation can attract attention; some editors, due to comparison with ''advanced-stage disease'' and ''adult-onset disease'', like the parallelism of ''early-stage disease'' and ''early-onset disease''. Similarly, the hyphen in ''little-celebrated paintings'' clarifies that one is not speaking of little paintings. Hyphens are usually used to connect numbers and words in modifying phrases. Such is the case when used to describe dimensional measurements of weight, size, and time, under the rationale that, like other compound modifiers, they take hyphens in attributive position (before the modified noun), although not in predicative position (after the modified noun). This is applied whether numerals or words are used for the numbers. Thus '' woman'' and '' woman'' or '' wingspan'' and '' wingspan'', but ''the woman is 28 years old'' and ''a wingspan of 32 feet''. However, with symbols for SI units (such as '' m'' or '' kg'')—as opposed to the ''names'' of these units (such as ''
metre The metre ( British spelling) or meter ( American spelling; see spelling differences) (from the French unit , from the Greek noun , "measure"), symbol m, is the primary unit of length in the International System of Units (SI), though its pre ...
'' or '' kilogram'')—the numerical value is always separated from it with a space: ''a 25 kg sphere''. When the unit names are spelled out, this recommendation does not apply: ''a sphere'', ''a roll of film''. In spelled-out fractions, hyphens are usually used when the fraction is used as an adjective but not when it is used as a noun: thus '' majority'' and '' portion'' but ''I drank two thirds of the bottle'' or ''I kept three quarters of it for myself''. However, at least one major style guide hyphenates spelled-out fractions invariably (whether adjective or noun). In English, an en dash, , sometimes replaces the hyphen in hyphenated compounds if either of its constituent parts is already hyphenated or contains a space (for example, ''San Francisco–area residents'', ''hormone receptor–positive cells'', ''cell cycle–related factors'', and ''public-school–private-school rivalries''). A commonly used alternative style is the hyphenated string (''hormone-receptor-positive cells'', ''cell-cycle-related factors''). (For other aspects of en dash–versus–hyphen use, see '' Dash § En dash''.)


Object–verbal-noun compounds

When an object is compounded with a verbal noun, such as '' egg-beater'' (a tool that beats eggs), the result is sometimes hyphenated. Some authors do this consistently, others only for disambiguation; in this case, ''egg-beater, egg beater,'' and ''eggbeater'' are all common. An example of an ambiguous phrase appears in ''they stood near a group of alien lovers'', which without a hyphen implies that they stood near a group of lovers who were aliens; ''they stood near a group of alien-lovers'' clarifies that they stood near a group of people who loved aliens, as "alien" can be either an adjective or a noun. On the other hand, in the phrase ''a hungry pizza-lover'', the hyphen will often be omitted (a hungry pizza lover), as "pizza" cannot be an adjective and the phrase is therefore unambiguous. Similarly, ''a man-eating shark'' is nearly the opposite of ''a man eating shark''; the first refers to a shark that eats people, and the second to a man who eats
shark meat Shark meat is a seafood consisting of the flesh of sharks. Several sharks are fished for human consumption, such as porbeagles, shortfin mako shark, requiem shark, and thresher shark, among others. Shark meat is popular in Asia, where it is oft ...
. ''A government-monitoring program'' is a program that monitors the government, whereas ''a government monitoring program'' is a government program that monitors something else.


Personal names

Some married couples compose a new
surname In some cultures, a surname, family name, or last name is the portion of one's personal name that indicates one's family, tribe or community. Practices vary by culture. The family name may be placed at either the start of a person's full name ...
(sometimes referred to as a
double-barrelled name A double-barrelled name is a type of compound surname, typically featuring two words (occasionally more), often joined by a hyphen. Examples of some notable people with double-barrelled names include Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Sacha Baron ...
) for their new family by combining their two surnames with a hyphen. Jane Doe and John Smith might become Jane and John Smith-Doe, or Doe-Smith, for instance. In some countries only the woman hyphenates her birth surname, appending her husband's surname. With already-hyphenated names, some parts are typically dropped. For example, Aaron Johnson and Samantha Taylor-Wood became Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Sam Taylor-Johnson. Not all hyphenated surnames are the result of marriage. For example Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a descendant of Louis Lemlé Dreyfus whose son was Léopold Louis-Dreyfus.


Other compounds

Connecting hyphens are used in a large number of miscellaneous compounds, other than modifiers, such as in ''lily-of-the-valley'', ''cock-a-hoop'', ''clever-clever'', ''tittle-tattle'' and ''orang-utan''. Use is often dictated by convention rather than fixed rules, and hyphenation styles may vary between authors; for example, ''orang-utan'' is also written as ''orangutan'' or ''orang utan'', and ''lily-of-the-valley'' may be hyphenated or not.


Suspended hyphens

A suspended hyphen (also called a suspensive hyphen or hanging hyphen, or less commonly a dangling or floating hyphen) may be used when a single base word is used with separate, consecutive, hyphenated words that are connected by "and", "or", or "to". For example, ''short-term and long-term plans'' may be written as ''short- and long-term plans.'' This usage is now common and specifically recommended in some style guides.E.g. Suspended hyphens are also used, though less commonly, when the base word comes first, such as in "investor-owned and ". Uses such as "applied and sociolinguistics" (instead of "applied linguistics and sociolinguistics") are frowned upon; the Indiana University style guide uses this example and says "Do not 'take a shortcut' when the first expression is ordinarily open" (i.e., ordinarily two separate words). This is different, however, from instances where prefixes that are normally closed up (styled solidly) are used suspensively. For example, ' becomes ' (not ') when suspended. Some editors prefer to avoid suspending such pairs, choosing instead to write out both words in full.


Other uses

A hyphen may be used to connect groups of numbers, such as in dates (see below), telephone numbers or sports scores. It can also be used to indicate a range of values, although many styles prefer an en dash (see examples at ). The hyphen is sometimes used to hide letters in words ( filleting for redaction or censoring), as in
G-d Judaism considers some names of God so holy that, once written, they should not be erased: YHWH, Adonai, El ("God"), Elohim ("God," a plural noun), Shaddai ("Almighty"), and Tzevaot (" fHosts"); some also include Ehyeh ("I Will Be").This is th ...
, although an en dash can be used as well ("G–d"). The hyphen is often used in reduplicatives.


Varied meanings

Some stark examples of semantic changes caused by the placement of hyphens to mark attributive phrases: * ''Disease-causing poor nutrition'' is poor nutrition that causes disease. ** ''Disease causing poor nutrition'' is a disease that causes poor nutrition. * A ''hard-working man'' is a man who works hard. ** A ''hard working man'' is a working man who is tough. * A ''man-eating shark'' is a shark that eats humans. ** A ''man eating shark'' is a man who is eating shark meat. * ''Three-hundred-year-old trees'' are an indeterminate number of trees that are each 300 years old. ** ''Three hundred-year-old trees'' are three trees that are each 100 years old. ** ''Three hundred year-old trees'' are 300 trees that are each a year old.


Origin and history

The first known documentation of the hyphen is in the grammatical works of
Dionysius Thrax Dionysius Thrax ( grc-gre, Διονύσιος ὁ Θρᾷξ ''Dionýsios ho Thrâix'', 170–90 BC) was a Greek grammarian and a pupil of Aristarchus of Samothrace. He was long considered to be the author of the earliest grammatical text on the Gr ...
. At the time hyphenation was joining two words that would otherwise be read separately by a low tie mark between the two words.Nicolas, Nick.
Greek Unicode Issues: Punctuation
". 2005. Accessed 7 October 2014.
In Greek these marks were known as '' enotikon'', officially romanized as a hyphen. 'Ellīnikós_Organismós_Typopoíīsīs'',_"Hellenic_Organization_for_Standardization".html" ;"title="Hellenic Organization for Standardization">'Ellīnikós Organismós Typopoíīsīs'', "Hellenic Organization for Standardization"">Hellenic Organization for Standardization">'Ellīnikós Organismós Typopoíīsīs'', "Hellenic Organization for Standardization" [''ELOT 743, 2ī Ekdosī'', "ELOT 743, "]. ELOT (Athens), 2001. With the introduction of letter-spacing in the Middle Ages, the hyphen, still written beneath the text, reversed its meaning. Scribes used the mark to connect two words that had been incorrectly separated by a space. This era also saw the introduction of the marginal hyphen, for words broken across lines. The modern format of the hyphen originated with Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, with the publication of his 42-line
Bible The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus ...
. His tools did not allow for a sublinear hyphen, and he thus moved it to the middle of the line. Examination of an original copy on
vellum Vellum is prepared animal skin or membrane, typically used as writing material. Parchment is another term for this material, from which vellum is sometimes distinguished, when it is made from calfskin, as opposed to that made from other anim ...
(Hubay index #35) in the U. S. Library of Congress shows that Gutenberg's movable type was set justified in a uniform style, 42 equal lines per page. The Gutenberg printing press required words made up of individual letters of type to be held in place by a surrounding non-printing rigid frame. Gutenberg solved the problem of making each line the same length to fit the frame by inserting a hyphen as the last element at the right-side margin. This interrupted the letters in the last word, requiring the remaining letters be carried over to the start of the line below. His
double hyphen In Latin script, the double hyphen is a punctuation mark that consists of two parallel hyphens. It was a development of the earlier , which developed from a Central European variant of the virgule slash, originally a form of scratch comma. S ...
appears throughout the Bible as a short, double line inclined to the right at a 60-degree angle:


Use in computing


Hyphen-minuses

In the
ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...
character encoding, the hyphen (or minus) is character 4510. As
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
is identical to ASCII (the 1967 version) for all encodings up to 12710, the number 4510 (2D16) is also assigned to this character in Unicode, where it is denoted as . Unicode has, in addition, other encodings for minus and hyphen characters: and , respectively. The unambiguous hyphen at U+2010 is generally inconvenient to enter on most keyboards and the glyphs for this hyphen and the hyphen-minus are identical in most fonts (
Lucida Sans Unicode In digital typography, Lucida Sans Unicode OpenType font from the design studio of Bigelow & HolmesAll Bigelow & Holmes Lucida typefaces are distributed by the designers througThe Lucida Fonts Storeand a subset of Lucida fonts is distributed bAs ...
is one of the few exceptions). Consequently, use of the hyphen-minus as the hyphen character is very common. Even the
Unicode Standard Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...
regularly uses the hyphen-minus for separating and joining rather than this hyphen. The hyphen-minus has limited use in indicating subtraction; for example, compare (minus) and (hyphen-minus) — in most fonts, the hyphen-minus will not have the optimal width, thickness, or vertical position, whereas the minus character will. Nevertheless, in many spreadsheet and programming applications the hyphen-minus must be typed to indicate subtraction, as use of the Unicode minus sign will produce an error. The hyphen-minus is often used instead of dashes or minus signs in situations where the latter characters are unavailable (such as type-written or ASCII-only text), where they take effort to enter (via
dialog box The dialog box (also called dialogue box (non-U.S. English), message box or simply dialog) is a graphical control element in the form of a small window that communicates information to the user and prompts them for a response. Dialog boxes ar ...
es or multi-key keyboard shortcuts), or when the writer is unaware of the distinction. Consequently, some writers use two hyphen-minuses to represent an em dash. The hyphen-minus character is also often used when specifying command-line options. The character is usually followed by one or more letters that indicate specific actions. Typically it is called a dash or switch in this context. Various implementations of the
getopt Getopt is a C library function used to parse command-line options of the Unix/POSIX style. It is a part of the POSIX specification, and is universal to Unix-like systems. It is also the name of a Unix program for parsing command line argument ...
function to parse command-line options additionally allow the use of two hyphen-minus characters, , to specify long option names that are more descriptive than their single-letter equivalents. Another use of hyphens is that employed by programs written with pipelining in mind: a single hyphen may be recognized in lieu of a filename, with the hyphen then serving as an indicator that a standard stream, instead of a file, is to be worked with.


Soft and hard hyphens

Although software ( hyphenation algorithms) can often automatically make decisions on when to hyphenate a word at a line break, it is also sometimes useful for the user to be able to insert cues for those decisions (which are dynamic in the online medium, given that text can be reflowed). For this purpose, the concept of a soft hyphen (discretionary hyphen, optional hyphen) was introduced, allowing such manual specification of a place where a hyphenated break is ''allowed'' but not ''forced''. That is, it does not force a line break in an inconvenient place when the text is later reflowed. Soft hyphens are inserted into the text at the positions where hyphenation ''may'' occur. It can be a tedious task to insert the soft hyphens by hand, and tools using hyphenation algorithms are available that do this automatically. Current modules of the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standard provide language-specific hyphenation dictionaries. Some (OpenType) fonts will change the character at the end of a word. An example is a font that places a round s – s – in the end of a word and a long s – ſ – everywhere else. If you want to tell the font to change to a round s in the middle of the word you can insert a soft hyphen. The font will think the letter before the hyphen is the end of the word, and change the ſ to s. In this way you can correct «prinſeſſen» by inserting a soft hyphen between the ſ's: «prinſeſ-ſen» becomes «prinſesſen» (which is correct in Norwegian). In contrast, a hyphen that is always displayed and printed is called a "hard hyphen". This can be a Unicode hyphen, a hyphen-minus, or a non-breaking hyphen (see
below Below may refer to: *Earth * Ground (disambiguation) *Soil *Floor * Bottom (disambiguation) *Less than *Temperatures below freezing *Hell or underworld People with the surname *Ernst von Below (1863–1955), German World War I general *Fred Below ...
). Confusingly, the term is sometimes limited to non-breaking hyphens.


Non-breaking hyphens

The non-breaking hyphen, nonbreaking hyphen, or no-break hyphen looks identical to the regular hyphen, but word processors treat it as a letter so that the hyphenated word will not be divided at the hyphen should this fall at what would be the end of a line of text; instead, either the whole hyphenated word will remain in full at the end of the line or it will go in full to the beginning of the next line. The non-breaking space exists for similar reasons. The word segmentation rules of most text systems consider a hyphen to be a word boundary and a valid point at which to break a line when flowing text. However, this is not always desirable behavior, especially when it could lead to ambiguity (e.g. ''retreat'' and ''re‑treat'' would be indistinguishable with a line break after ''re''), or in languages other than English (e.g., a line break at the hyphen in Irish or
Romanian Romanian may refer to: *anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania ** Romanians, an ethnic group **Romanian language, a Romance language ***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language **Romanian cuisine, traditiona ...
would be undesirable). The non-breaking hyphen addresses this need. For usage on Wikipedia see Wikipedia:Non-breaking hyphen.


Usage in date notation

Use of hyphens to delineate the parts of a written date, as opposed to the slashes used conventionally in Anglophone countries, is specified in the international standard ISO 8601. Thus, for example, 1789-07-14 is the standard way of writing the date of Bastille Day. This standard has been transposed as European Standard EN 28601 and has been incorporated into various national typographic style guides (e.g.,
DIN DIN or Din or din may refer to: People and language * Din (name), people with the name * Dīn, an Arabic word with three general senses: judgment, custom, and religion from which the name originates * Dinka language (ISO 639 code: din), spoken by ...
5008 in Germany). Now all official European Union (and many member state) documents use this style. This is also the typical date format used in large parts of Europe and Asia, although sometimes with other separators than the hyphen. This method has gained influence within North America, as most common computer file systems make the use of slashes in
file name A filename or file name is a name used to uniquely identify a computer file in a directory structure. Different file systems impose different restrictions on filename lengths. A filename may (depending on the file system) include: * name &ndas ...
s difficult or impossible. DOS, OS/2 and
Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for se ...
use to introduce and separate switches to shell commands, and on both Windows and
Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...
systems slashes in a filename introduce sub-directories which may not be desirable. Besides encouraging use of dashes, the Y-M-D order and zero-padding of numbers less than 10 are also copied from ISO 8601 to make the filenames sort by date order.


Unicode

Apart from dash and minus sign, Unicode has multiple hyphen characters: * , a character of multiple uses * (HTML ) (see note) * (HTML or ) * for medieval texts * Note: The serves as an invisible marker used to specify a place in text where a hyphenated break is allowed without forcing a line break in an inconvenient place if the text is reflowed. It becomes visible only after word wrapping at the end of a line. And in non-Latin scripts: * * * (used only as a line-breaking hyphen) * (used in ancient Near-Eastern linguistics and in blackletter typefaces) * (used in Hebrew) * (has the Unicode property of "Hyphen" despite its name) * (compatibility character for a small hyphen-minus, used in East Asian typography) * (compatibility character for a wide hyphen-minus, used in East Asian typography) * (compatibility character for a wide katakana middle dot, has the Unicode property of "Hyphen" despite its name) Unicode distinguishes the hyphen from the general interpunct. The characters below do not have the Unicode property of "Hyphen" despite their names: * * * (HTML ) * * * * (See interpunct and
bullet (typography) In typography, a bullet or bullet point, , is a typographical symbol or glyph used to introduce items in a list. For example: *Point 1 *Point 2 *Point 3 The bullet symbol may take any of a variety of shapes, such as circular, square, diamo ...
for more round characters.)


See also

*
Double hyphen In Latin script, the double hyphen is a punctuation mark that consists of two parallel hyphens. It was a development of the earlier , which developed from a Central European variant of the virgule slash, originally a form of scratch comma. S ...
* French orthography#Hyphens * Hyphen War * Papyrological hyphen: equivalent in pre-modern Greek * Enhypen - South Korean boy band whose name derives from the hyphen symbol


Notes


References


External links

* Wiktionary list of English phrases spelled with a hyphen
Economist Style Guide—Hyphens


* Jukka Korpela

(See also his article o

) * Markus Kuhn, ttp://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/L2/03155r-kuhn-soft-hyphen.pdf Unicode interpretation of SOFT HYPHEN breaks ISO 8859-1 compatibility Unicode Technical Committee document L2/03-155R, June 2003.
United States Government Printing Office Style Manual 2000
6. Compounding Rules] {{navbox punctuation Punctuation Punctuation of English