When Words Get Together

Hyphenated words / hyphenated-words / hyphenatedwords

Catriona Tippin aka @ProofReadingTip gives us the low-down...


Here’s a surface-skimming look at the use (or not) of hyphens to join ordinarily separate words. 

One of the many delights of the English language is the speed of construction of new words. 

Sometimes a three-part evolution takes place: 

book mark / book-mark / bookmark 

court room / court-room / courtroom 

Here are some words at the end of this process:

blackjack 

bumblebee

cashflow 

email 

goodwill 

handbook 

highbrow 

lifeline

 lifestyle 

masterclasses 

pigeonhole 

singsong 

spellchecker 

takeover 

workforce

Here are some well-established and happy hyphens:

born-again 

fast-paced 

get-together 

knee-jerk 

rat-race 

sabre-rattling 

shell-like 

slow-blinking 

Proof reading / proof-reading / proofreading – all three forms are in use but I think proofreading is winning. 

The need to create hashtags and websites is probably speeding up the fusion of words and the losing of hyphens. 

There may be two adjacent occurrences of the same letter but this doesn’t necessarily stop the fusion:

cooperation 

earring 

These still appear occasionally with a hyphen but are happiest without. 

Sometimes you can tell two words are never going to lose the hyphen, there’s some kind of instinctive aesthetic imperative going on with hat-trick – hattrick just doesn’t look right, does it? 

Some prefixes have fused to their stems: 

republished 
redrafting 
postnatal
proactive
preamble
ongoing
multimedia
mismatch
degrade 

Some have not (yet?):

anti-freeze

ex-husband

 in-depth

 pre-school 

Email is increasingly used rather than e-mail, though there’s also e-invoice and I doubt that will ever lose the hyphen (as it would look oddly German?) 

Here are some examples where the hyphen (or not) is essential to the meaning:

re-covering / recovering 

re-creation / recreation 

re-laying / relaying 

Compound modifiers may have hyphens which matter to the meaning; these are the hyphens you need to check carefully. I like these examples:

Three-hundred-year-old trees are an indeterminate number of trees that are 300 years old. 
Three hundred-year-old trees are three trees that are 100 years old. 
Three hundred year-old trees are 300 trees that are one year old. 

Use the Find function under your Edit tab to look for the hyphens you’ve used, and check the lot, giving each one some thought.

Remember a hyphen isn’t a dash – but that’s another story, for a future Proofreading Tip.

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Catriona Tippin has been a member of SCBWI since 2006 and helps organise venues for SCBWI North East. Details of her writing and illustrating here. She proofreads study guides, house magazines and publicity material for two national educational charities, in addition to working on a variety of proofreads and copyedits for the growing self-published world. Her monthly column is intended to give you food for thought, remembering “Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling or typographical error” (McKean’s Law, named after its inventor Erin McKean, editor of the Oxford American Dictionary).