hyphenation - What are the rules for splitting words at the end of a line?


What are the rules in English language to split words at the end of a line?


Where exactly must the hyphen split the word?



Answer



The easiest thing to do, and the only way of being sure you agree with the authorities, is to look words up in the dictionary. Some of the hyphenations currently in American dictionaries make no sense at all. For example, the reason that prai-rie and fair-y are hyphenated the way they are seems to be that 150 years ago, the editors of Webster's dictionary thought they didn't rhyme1; prairie was pronounced pray-ree with a long 'a', while fairy was pronounced fair-ee with an r-colored 'a'.


That said, there are a few hyphenation rules that will let you hyphenate 90% of English words properly (and your hyphenations of the remaining 10% will be perfectly reasonable, even if they disagree with the authorities'). Here they are, in roughly decreasing order of priority:



  • Break words at morpheme boundaries (inter-face, pearl-y, but ear-ly).

  • Break words between doubled consonants — 'sc' counts here but not 'ck'. (bat-tle, as-cent, jack-et).

  • Never separate an English digraph (e.g., th, ch, sh, ph, gh, ng, qu) when pronounced as a single unit (au-thor but out-house).

  • Never break a word before a string of consonants that cannot begin a word in English (anx-ious and not an-xious).

  • Never break a word after a short vowel in an accented syllable (rap-id but stu-pid).


Finally, if the above rules leave more than one acceptable break between syllables, use the Maximal Onset Principle:



  • If there is a string of consonants between syllables, break this string as far to the left as you can (mon-strous).


There are lots of exceptions to these rules:


Sometimes the rules conflict with each other. For example, ra-tio-nal gets hyphenated after a short vowel in an accented syllable because ti acts as a digraph indicating that the 't' should be pronounced 'sh'.


Sometimes it's not clear what constitutes a morpheme boundary: why ger-mi-nate and not germ-i-nate?


Sometimes the pronunciation of a word varies—/væpɪd/ or /veɪpɪd/? Merriam-Webster and American Heritage dictionaries agree that both pronunciations are valid, but they disagree about the hyphenation.


And some hyphenations I can't figure out the reason for: the Maximum Onset Principle would suggest pa-stry, but the authorities all agree on pas-try.


1I believe some American dialects still make this distinction in pronunciation; the editors of Webster's dictionary weren't imagining things.


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