For me hyphens have always been a kind of curious wonder. Putting in
hyphens is fun, but worrying afterwards about whether or not it was
correctly used is not fun.

One common use of hyphens is to separate words that won’t fit at the
end of a line. They should be placed in places that break up  the word in
roughly equal parts, and between syllables, such as ”encour-aging”,
and not ”enc-ouraging.” This post, however, is going to be about one
particular use of hyphens that I never can remember.

Hypens are sometimes used to make two words read like one word.
This site likens them to trailer hitches, making the two one. Hyphens
are used to connect words that make up an adjective describing nouns,
such as:

  •  coffee-brown colored suit
  • well-known celebrity
  • nineteenth-century play
  • strawberry-smoothie flavoring
  • red-apple smoothie flavoring

Now in the next to last case, you can be sure that the flavoring is
“strawberry smoothie,” and not that it’s a strawberry flavoring meant
only for use in smoothies. If it was a flavoring for smoothies, the hyphen
would not be necessary. However in the last case, it is a smoothie
flavoring (red apple).

Here are some more examples of different meanings of the same sentences
without and with hyphens

  •  black-raspberry soda (the flavoring is black raspberry)
  • black raspberry soda (the soda is black, the flavor is raspberry)
  • great-pink daisy (the variety is great pink)
  • great pink daisy (it’s a pink daisy that is a wonderful flower)
  • green-crayon carpet (it’s a carpet that is the same color as a green crayon)
  • green crayon carpet (it’s a carpet made out of crayons)

Note that there are some two word combinations that are acceptable without the hyphen, such as waterproof, or highschool, or floppy disk. Check a current dictionary to be sure. Hopefully this clears up some of the confusion over hyphens, and I’ll be hyphenating two-worded adjectives without worry. To read more check out the information at The Writer’s Complex, or from The University of Sussex.

Posted by Bonnie under Uncategorized, english