Hyphens and where to stick ‘em
Welcome to line school! No, not that kind of line, you cheeky monkey.
Line school is about horizontal lines in writing that confuse us to no end—namely the hyphen, en dash, and em dash. Where do they go? What are they used for? What are you doing in my house? All questions asked, and answered, during line school. Today, we're going to look at the wee-est and most common of all the lines, the hyphen.
The hyphen is usually located on the same key as the underscore. Its use in writing is generally as a clarifier but knowing how to use a hyphen will make your writing flow and help you avoid misunderstandings.
There are six common uses for the hyphen. Three are more important, three are less important.
More important reasons to use a hyphen
Compound modifiers
Use a hyphen in a situation where you have 1) two words that combine to modify another word, and they rely on each other to retain meaning and 2) they come before and modify another word. This is the most common use of hyphens and the trickiest to figure out. There are some exceptions to do with adverbs (like in the phrase “a very confusing hyphen”, no hyphen needed with very or -ing words) but ignore them for now.
For example, in the sentence “For years, my grandfather was locked in a battle with a quick-witted squirrel who liked to eat the seeds left out for the birds*”, “quick-witted” modifies the word “squirrel” so it’s hyphenated.
In the sentence “The squirrel who regularly enraged my grandfather was very quick witted.”, the use of “quick witted” isn’t preceding a noun so no hyphen needed.
Other examples:
squirrel-proof bird feeder
cruelty-free bacon
part-time job
five-page document
ten-minute wait
English-speaking country
three-year-old son
Vowels doubling up
When the structure of a compound word means you'd end up with a weird vowel car crash, add a hyphen.
For example:
semiintelligent becomes semi-intelligent
metaanalysis becomes meta-analysis
reelect becomes re-elect
weeest becomes wee-est (see intro para but also not a real word but also who am I to say what is real)
Confusing words
English is often a silly-goose language populated with words that mean many things, depending on how you slice it. Recollect means to remember. Recollect could also mean to collect something again. Use hyphens to avoid confusion.
For example:
recreation (enjoyment, leisure)\re-creation (to recreate something, to create something again)
repair (to fix)/re-pair (to pair again)
unionized (US spelling of the past tense of unionize)/un-ionized (US spelling of a thing that is not ionized)
Less important reasons to use a hyphen
Splitting a word across a line
Your computer will usually decide this for you but if you ever have to do it manually, split the word across the line evenly, on the syllable, and use a hyphen to show the word continues on the next line.
Prefixes and suffixes
Prefixes are attachments at the start of words (such as self-, macro-, ex-) and suffixes are attachments at the end (such as -ise, -ate, and -ify). Some of these words will need a hyphen, sometimes to make it clear it's an intentionally Frankensteined word (like "Bieber-ify", the process of making something more Justin Bieber, a terrifying technological advancement).
Sometimes a prefixed or suffixed word will become so widely used that we drop the hyphen (like selfhood, exceptional, or diversify). Actually, this is true of many words such as “today: (in the 16th century it was “to-day”), “ice cream” (in living memory it was “ice-cream”), and “bumblebee” (it was “bumble-bee” until 2007 when the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary dropped the hyphens from 16,000 words, freaking out nerds everywhere). Style guides will often have opinions on how to handle words that are in flux between hyphen, compound, and no hyphen.
Compound numbers
There's a big difference between twenty four-hour shifts (twenty shifts, each four hours long), twenty-four hour shifts (twenty-four shifts that each last an hour), or twenty-four-hour shifts (shifts that last for twenty-four hours). My brain hurts thinking about it. Pay attention to where your hyphen goes.
TL;DR? Use hyphens to combine linked words when they precede a noun; use hyphens to split confusing words or words that would be confusing without a hyphen.
*True story, Grandad was often tormented by the red squirrel in his garden. He rigged up increasingly elaborate structures to prevent the squirrel from eating the seeds in the bird feeder. The squirrel always won and by the end of the war, he had grown quite large on a steady diet of contraband seed.