punctuation - When is it appropriate to use a hyphen?





To hyphenate or not?



What is the proper way to spell "side dish"? Is it: "side dish" or "side-dish"?


Also, Is it "ham-fried" or "ham fried"?


Basically, when do you use hyphens?



Answer



There's no single answer to this: various conventions exist depending on personal preference and/or the in-house (or "in house", or "inhouse") style guide for the particular publication you're writing for. That said, I think that in general, using hyphens between the elements of compound nouns is less common nowadays (so people would tend to write "side dish", "ticket office" etc, not "side-dish", "ticket-office"). I also get the impression (with no hard statistics to back it up) that US usage favours the hyphen still a bit more than UK usage.


I think a common modern convention is to use hyphens mainly for cases of ambiguity or where a compound functions as an adjective (or perhaps more specifically, compounds "in attributive position"[*]). The hyphen is maybe a bit more common with compound verbs as well.


[*] Bauer, L. (2006), "Compounds and Minor Word-formation Types" in The Handbook of English Linguistics, Blackwell, pp. 483-506.


From the same author:



We might, for instance, find coffee pot, coffee-pot or coffeepot, depending on the dictionary we care to consult. When even dictionaries fail to agree, we can be sure that actual usage provides a bewlidering amount of variation. (p. 485)



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