9 Reasons the Hyphen Is Important
photo credit: martinalanotte
What a writer wants to do is not what he does — Jorge Borges
Well, I stand corrected… After a comment on last week’s post on the dash from Mrs. S asking “So when do I use a hyphen? Is that just for joining words together?“, I did a little research and realized the hyphen is much more important than I realized. So, here’s an entire post just on the hyphen! And a big thank you to Eats, Shoots & Leaves for verifying that the hyphen should not be ignored.
First, a linguistic lesson: “Hyphen” means “under one” “into one” or “together”
The primary purpose of a hyphen is to join words, as mentioned last week, but also to aid in understanding.
So, here’s a rundown of how the hyphen links words and clarifies:
- to join and thereby create numbers: forty-two
- to link nouns: the Houston-San Francisco route
- to create a noun phrase that qualifies another noun: stainless-steel knife
- prefixes: un-American
- hyphenated phrase: four-year-old
- spelling out nouns: D-O-G
- avoid letter collision: de-ice or shell-like
- to indicate a word continues onto the next line
- to indicate stammering or hesitation
Any other functions I may have overlooked?
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Comments
Thank you for your comment!! I actually did cover using apostrophes with time: http://litguides.com/2008/07/29/tuesday-tips-plural-apostrophes/
When the Hugh Grant movie Two Weeks Notice came out, nit-picky grammarians were beside themselves… 
It should have been Two Weeks’ Notice!
Ah stammering and hesitation - so perhaps I do want to use a hyphen after all
We had a debate the other day at work about whether you should use an apostrophe after a period of time - ie 10 months’ free credit - and I thought of you! Perhaps you could cover that off in a future post…