103-424: The hyphen ‐ is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation . The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes ( en dash – , em dash — and others), which are wider, or with the minus sign − , which is also wider and usually drawn a little higher to match the crossbar in the plus sign + . As an orthographic concept,
206-467: A punctus was placed at one of several heights to denote rhetorical divisions in speech: In addition, the Greeks used the paragraphos (or gamma ) to mark the beginning of sentences, marginal diples to mark quotations, and a koronis to indicate the end of major sections. During the 1st century BC, Romans also made occasional use of symbols to indicate pauses, but by the 4th century AD
309-527: A rule of thumb , affixes are not hyphenated unless the lack of a hyphen would hurt clarity. The hyphen may be used between vowel letters (e.g., ee , ea , ei ) to indicate that they do not form a digraph . Some words have both hyphenated and unhyphenated variants: de-escalate /deescalate , co-operation /cooperation , re-examine /reexamine , de-emphasize /deemphasize , and so on. Words often lose their hyphen as they become more common, such as email instead of e-mail . When there are tripled letters,
412-445: A standard stream , instead of a file, is to be worked with. Although software ( hyphenation algorithms ) can often automatically make decisions on when to hyphenate a word at a line break, it is also sometimes useful for the user to be able to insert cues for those decisions (which are dynamic in the online medium, given that text can be reflowed ). For this purpose, the concept of a soft hyphen (discretionary hyphen, optional hyphen)
515-468: A complete review of spelling forms and defining vocabulary. 16,000 words lost their hyphen. Angus Stevenson, the editor of the Shorter OED, stated the reason: "People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they're not really sure what they are for." Its researchers reviewed a corpus of 2 billion words (in newspapers, books, web sites and blogs from 2000). Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream
618-622: A different glyph). Webster's Third New International Dictionary and the Chambers Dictionary use a double hyphen for integral hyphens and a single hyphen for line-breaks, whereas Kromhout's Afrikaans–English dictionary uses the opposite convention. The Concise Oxford Dictionary (fifth edition) suggested repeating an integral hyphen at the start of the following line. Prefixes (such as de- , pre- , re- , and non- ) and suffixes (such as -less , -like , -ness , and -hood ) are sometimes hyphenated, especially when
721-524: A few punctuation marks, as it was mostly aimed at recording business transactions. Only with the Greek playwrights (such as Euripides and Aristophanes ) did the ends of sentences begin to be marked to help actors know when to make a pause during performances. Punctuation includes space between words and both obsolete and modern signs. By the 19th century, the punctuation marks were used hierarchically, according to their weight. Six marks, proposed in 1966 by
824-411: A group of alien-lovers clarifies that they stood near a group of people who loved aliens, as "alien" can be either an adjective or a noun. On the other hand, in the phrase a hungry pizza-lover , the hyphen will often be omitted (a hungry pizza lover), as "pizza" cannot be an adjective and the phrase is therefore unambiguous. Similarly, a man-eating shark is nearly the opposite of a man eating shark ;
927-585: A hard hyphen is intended (for example, self-con·scious , un·self-con·scious , long-stand·ing ). Similarly, hyphens may be used to indicate how a word is being or should be spelled. For example, W-O-R-D spells "word" . In nineteenth-century American literature, hyphens were also used irregularly to divide syllables in words from indigenous North American languages, without regard for etymology or pronunciation, such as "Shuh-shuh-gah" (from Ojibwe zhashagi , "blue heron") in The Song of Hiawatha . This usage
1030-432: A hyphen may be or should be used for clarity, depending on the style guide. For example, the phrase more-important reasons ("reasons that are more important") is distinguished from more important reasons ("additional important reasons"), where more is an adjective. Similarly, more-beautiful scenery (with a mass-noun ) is distinct from more beautiful scenery . (In contrast, the hyphen in "a more-important reason"
1133-519: A hyphen when no confusion is likely: grade point average and department store manager . When a compound modifier follows the term to which it applies, a hyphen is typically not used if the compound is a temporary compound. For example, "that gentleman is well respected", not "that gentleman is well-respected"; or "a patient-centered approach was used" but "the approach was patient centered." But permanent compounds, found as headwords in dictionaries, are treated as invariable, so if they are hyphenated in
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#17327648306991236-402: A hyphen. Jane Doe and John Smith might become Jane and John Smith-Doe, or Doe-Smith, for instance. In some countries only the woman hyphenates her birth surname, appending her husband's surname. With already-hyphenated names, some parts are typically dropped. For example, Aaron Johnson and Samantha Taylor-Wood became Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Sam Taylor-Johnson . Not all hyphenated surnames are
1339-417: A noun: thus two-thirds majority and one-eighth portion but I drank two thirds of the bottle or I kept three quarters of it for myself . However, at least one major style guide hyphenates spelled-out fractions invariably (whether adjective or noun). In English, an en dash , – , sometimes replaces the hyphen in hyphenated compounds if either of its constituent parts is already hyphenated or contains
1442-485: A range of values, although many styles prefer an en dash (see Dash § En dash §§ Ranges of values ). It is sometimes used to hide letters in words ( filleting for redaction or censoring ), as in " G-d ", although an en dash can be used as well ("G–d"). It is often used in reduplication . Due to their similar appearances, hyphens are sometimes mistakenly used where an en dash or em dash would be more appropriate. Some stark examples of semantic changes caused by
1545-550: A sentence, a function for which normal question and exclamation marks can also be used, but which may be considered obsolescent. The patent application entered into the national phase only in Canada. It was advertised as lapsing in Australia on 27 January 1994 and in Canada on 6 November 1995. Other proposed punctuation marks include: Shorter Oxford English Dictionary The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary ( SOED )
1648-400: A single character (-), sometimes repeated to represent a long dash. The spaces of different widths available to professional typesetters were generally replaced by a single full-character width space, with typefaces monospaced . In some cases a typewriter keyboard did not include an exclamation point (!), which could otherwise be constructed by the overstrike of an apostrophe and a period;
1751-430: A single hyphen-minus in math mode ( $ -$ ) renders a minus sign, two hyphen-minuses ( -- ) renders an en dash, and three hyphen-minuses ( --- ) renders an em dash. The hyphen-minus character is also often used when specifying command-line options . The character is usually followed by one or more letters that indicate specific actions. Typically it is called a dash or switch in this context. Various implementations of
1854-404: A space (for example, San Francisco–area residents , hormone receptor–positive cells , cell cycle–related factors , and public-school–private-school rivalries ). A commonly used alternative style is the hyphenated string ( hormone-receptor-positive cells , cell-cycle-related factors ). (For other aspects of en dash–versus–hyphen use, see Dash § En dash .) When an object is compounded with
1957-461: A surrounding nonprinting rigid frame. Gutenberg solved the problem of making each line the same length to fit the frame by inserting a hyphen as the last element at the right-side margin. This interrupted the letters in the last word, requiring the remaining letters be carried over to the start of the line below. His double hyphen , ⸗ , appears throughout the Bible as a short, double line inclined to
2060-634: A suspended or "hanging" hyphen that stands in for a repeated word (e.g., nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers ). Style conventions that apply to hyphens (and dashes) have evolved to support ease of reading in complex constructions; editors often accept deviations if they aid rather than hinder easy comprehension. The use of the hyphen in English compound nouns and verbs has, in general, been steadily declining. Compounds that might once have been hyphenated are increasingly left with spaces or are combined into one word. Reflecting this changing usage, in 2007,
2163-464: A thin space. In Canadian French , this is only the case for ⟨:⟩ . In Greek , the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point ⟨·⟩ , known as the ano teleia ( άνω τελεία ). In Georgian , three dots ⟨ ჻ ⟩ were formerly used as a sentence or paragraph divider. It
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#17327648306992266-432: A verbal noun, such as egg-beater (a tool that beats eggs), the result is sometimes hyphenated. Some authors do this consistently, others only for disambiguation; in this case, egg-beater, egg beater, and eggbeater are all common. An example of an ambiguous phrase appears in they stood near a group of alien lovers , which without a hyphen implies that they stood near a group of lovers who were aliens; they stood near
2369-472: Is a modern innovation; pre-modern Arabic did not use punctuation. Hebrew , which is also written from right to left, uses the same characters as in English, ⟨,⟩ and ⟨?⟩ . Originally, Sanskrit had no punctuation. In the 17th century, Sanskrit and Marathi , both written using Devanagari , started using the vertical bar ⟨ । ⟩ to end a line of prose and double vertical bars ⟨॥⟩ in verse. Punctuation
2472-470: Is also written as orangutan or orang utan , and lily-of-the-valley may be hyphenated or not. A suspended hyphen (also called a suspensive hyphen or hanging hyphen , or less commonly a dangling or floating hyphen ) may be used when a single base word is used with separate, consecutive, hyphenated words that are connected by "and", "or", or "to". For example, short-term and long-term plans may be written as short- and long-term plans. This usage
2575-502: Is an English language dictionary published by the Oxford University Press . The SOED is a two-volume abridgement of the twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ). The first editor, William Little, worked on the book from 1902 until his death in 1922. The dictionary was completed by H. W. Fowler , Jessie Coulson , and C. T. Onions . An abridgement of the complete work was contemplated from 1879, when
2678-625: Is generally inconvenient to enter on most keyboards and the glyphs for this hyphen and the hyphen-minus are identical in most fonts ( Lucida Sans Unicode is one of the few exceptions). Consequently, use of the hyphen-minus as the hyphen character is very common. Even the Unicode Standard regularly uses the hyphen-minus rather than the U+2010 hyphen. The hyphen-minus has limited use in indicating subtraction; for example, compare 4+3−2=5 (minus) and 4+3-2=5 (hyphen-minus) — in most typefaces,
2781-449: Is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly. (The CD-ROM supports Windows 2000 or higher, Mac OS x 10.3.9 (PowerPC) or 10.4 or 10.5 (Intel) or higher). The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is available on CD-ROM for Windows and Macintosh. Version 3.0 of that CD-ROM is copy-protected using SecuROM . The dictionary is also available as an electronic download plug-in for WordWeb for Windows and for Mac OS X. In addition to all of
2884-758: Is most useful when the width of the column (called the "line length" in typography) is very narrow. For example: We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America ... We, therefore, the represen- tatives of the United States of America ... Rules (or guidelines) for correct hyphenation vary between languages, and may be complex, and they can interact with other orthographic and typesetting practices. Hyphenation algorithms , when employed in concert with dictionaries, are sufficient for all but
2987-585: Is not necessary, because the syntax cannot be misinterpreted.) A few short and common words—such as well , ill , little , and much —attract special attention in this category. The hyphen in "well-[past_participled] noun", such as in " well-differentiated cells ", might reasonably be judged superfluous (the syntax is unlikely to be misinterpreted), yet plenty of style guides call for it. Because early has both adverbial and adjectival senses, its hyphenation can attract attention; some editors, due to comparison with advanced-stage disease and adult-onset disease , like
3090-476: Is now common and specifically recommended in some style guides. Suspended hyphens are also used, though less commonly, when the base word comes first, such as in "investor-owned and -operated ". Uses such as "applied and sociolinguistics" (instead of "applied linguistics and sociolinguistics") are frowned upon; the Indiana University style guide uses this example and says "Do not 'take a shortcut' when
3193-501: Is now rare and proscribed, except in some place names such as Ah-gwah-ching . Compound modifiers are groups of two or more words that jointly modify the meaning of another word. When a compound modifier other than an adverb – adjective combination appears before a term, the compound modifier is often hyphenated to prevent misunderstanding, such as in American-football player or little-celebrated paintings . Without
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3296-406: Is represented by a colon, and vice versa; the exclamation mark is represented by a diagonal similar to a tilde ⟨~⟩ , while the question mark ⟨՞⟩ resembles an unclosed circle placed after the last vowel of the word. Arabic , Urdu , and Persian —written from right to left—use a reversed question mark: ⟨؟⟩ , and a reversed comma: ⟨،⟩ . This
3399-420: Is still hyphenated by both Dorland's and Merriam-Webster's Medical , the solid (that is, unhyphenated) styling ( protooncogene ) is a common variant, particularly among oncologists and geneticists. A diaeresis may also be used in a like fashion, either to separate and mark off monographs (as in coöperation ) or to signalize a vocalic terminal e (for example, Brontë ). This use of the diaeresis peaked in
3502-504: Is still sometimes used in calligraphy. Spanish and Asturian (both of them Romance languages used in Spain ) use an inverted question mark ⟨ ¿ ⟩ at the beginning of a question and the normal question mark at the end, as well as an inverted exclamation mark ⟨ ¡ ⟩ at the beginning of an exclamation and the normal exclamation mark at the end. Armenian uses several punctuation marks of its own. The full stop
3605-610: The punctus , a comma-shaped mark, and a 7-shaped mark ( comma positura ), often used in combination. The same marks could be used in the margin to mark off quotations. In the late 8th century a different system emerged in France under the Carolingian dynasty . Originally indicating how the voice should be modulated when chanting the liturgy , the positurae migrated into any text meant to be read aloud, and then to all manuscripts. Positurae first reached England in
3708-450: The Bible started to be produced. These were designed to be read aloud, so the copyists began to introduce a range of marks to aid the reader, including indentation , various punctuation marks ( diple , paragraphos , simplex ductus ), and an early version of initial capitals ( litterae notabiliores ). Jerome and his colleagues, who made a translation of the Bible into Latin ,
3811-687: The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standard provide language-specific hyphenation dictionaries. Punctuation Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, consisting of points between the words and horizontal strokes between sections. The alphabet -based writing began with no spaces, no capitalization , no vowels (see abjad ), and with only
3914-646: The Indian subcontinent , ⟨ :- ⟩ is sometimes used in place of colon or after a subheading. Its origin is unclear, but could be a remnant of the British Raj . Another punctuation common in the Indian Subcontinent for writing monetary amounts is the use of ⟨/-⟩ or ⟨/=⟩ after the number. For example, Rs. 20/- or Rs. 20/= implies 20 whole rupees. Thai , Khmer , Lao and Burmese did not use punctuation until
4017-574: The Oxford University Press took over from the Philological Society on what was then known as A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles . However, no action was taken until 1902, when the work was begun by William Little , a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford . He laboured until his death in 1922, at which point he had completed "A" to "T", and "V". The remaining letters were completed by H. W. Fowler ("U", "X", "Y", and "Z") and Mrs. E. A. Coulson (Jessie Coulson) ("W") under
4120-627: The Vulgate ( c. AD 400 ), employed a layout system based on established practices for teaching the speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero . Under his layout per cola et commata every sense-unit was indented and given its own line. This layout was solely used for biblical manuscripts during the 5th–9th centuries but was abandoned in favor of punctuation. In the 7th–8th centuries Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes, whose native languages were not derived from Latin , added more visual cues to render texts more intelligible. Irish scribes introduced
4223-603: The at sign (@) has gone from an obscure character mostly used by sellers of bulk commodities (10 pounds @$ 2.00 per pound), to a very common character in common use for both technical routing and an abbreviation for "at". The tilde (~), in moveable type only used in combination with vowels, for mechanical reasons ended up as a separate key on mechanical typewriters , and like @ it has been put to completely new uses. There are two major styles of punctuation in English: British or American. These two styles differ mainly in
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4326-407: The getopt function to parse command-line options additionally allow the use of two hyphen-minus characters, -- , to specify long option names that are more descriptive than their single-letter equivalents. Another use of hyphens is that employed by programs written with pipelining in mind: a single hyphen may be recognized in lieu of a filename, with the hyphen then serving as an indicator that
4429-478: The glyph for hyphen-minus will not have the optimal width, thickness, or vertical position, whereas the minus character is typically designed so that it does. Nevertheless, in many spreadsheet and programming applications the hyphen-minus must be typed to indicate subtraction, as use of the Unicode minus sign will not be recognised. The hyphen-minus is often used instead of dashes or minus signs in situations where
4532-404: The names of these units (such as metre or kilogram )—the numerical value is always separated from it with a space: a 25 kg sphere . When the unit names are spelled out, this recommendation does not apply: a 25-kilogram sphere , a roll of 35-millimetre film . In spelled-out fractions , hyphens are usually used when the fraction is used as an adjective but not when it is used as
4635-567: The semicolon , making occasional use of parentheses , and creating the modern comma by lowering the virgule. By 1566, Aldus Manutius the Younger was able to state that the main object of punctuation was the clarification of syntax . By the 19th century, punctuation in the Western world had evolved "to classify the marks hierarchically, in terms of weight". Cecil Hartley's poem identifies their relative values: The stop point out, with truth,
4738-545: The 12th century scribes also began entering diples (sometimes double) within the column of text. The amount of printed material and its readership began to increase after the invention of moveable type in Europe in the 1450s. Martin Luther 's German Bible translation was one of the first mass printed works, he used only virgule , full stop and less than one percent question marks as punctuation. The focus of punctuation still
4841-603: The 1960s, it failed to achieve widespread use. Nevertheless, it and its inverted form were given code points in Unicode: U+203D ‽ INTERROBANG , U+2E18 ⸘ INVERTED INTERROBANG . The six additional punctuation marks proposed in 1966 by the French author Hervé Bazin in his book Plumons l'Oiseau ("Let's pluck the bird", 1966) could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis . These were: An international patent application
4944-409: The 19th century, it was common to hyphenate adverb–adjective modifiers with the adverb ending in -ly (e.g., "a craftily-constructed chair"). However, this has become rare. For example, wholly owned subsidiary and quickly moving vehicle are unambiguous, because the adverbs clearly modify the adjectives: "quickly" cannot modify "vehicle". However, if an adverb can also function as an adjective, then
5047-555: The French author Hervé Bazin , could be seen as predecessors of emoticons and emojis . In rare cases, the meaning of a text can be changed substantially by using different punctuation, such as in "woman, without her man, is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of men to women), contrasted with "woman: without her, man is nothing" (emphasizing the importance of women to men). Similar changes in meaning can be achieved in spoken forms of most languages by using elements of speech such as suprasegmentals . The rules of punctuation vary with
5150-455: The Greek théseis —called distinctiones in Latin —prevailed, as reported by Aelius Donatus and Isidore of Seville (7th century). Latin texts were sometimes laid out per capitula , where each sentence was placed on its own line. Diples were used, but by the late period these often degenerated into comma-shaped marks. Punctuation developed dramatically when large numbers of copies of
5253-458: The West wrote in scriptio continua , i.e. without punctuation delimiting word boundaries . Around the 5th century BC, the Greeks began using punctuation consisting of vertically arranged dots—usually a dicolon or tricolon—as an aid in the oral delivery of texts. After 200 BC, Greek scribes adopted the théseis system invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium , where a single dot called
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#17327648306995356-400: The adoption of punctuation from the West in the 20th century. Blank spaces are more frequent than full stops or commas. In 1962, American advertising executive Martin K. Speckter proposed the interrobang (‽), a combination of the question mark and exclamation point, to mark rhetorical questions or questions stated in a tone of disbelief. Although the new punctuation mark was widely discussed in
5459-424: The cited dictionary, the hyphenation will be used in both attributive and predicative positions. For example, "A cost-effective method was used" and "The method was cost-effective" ( cost-effective is a permanent compound that is hyphenated as a headword in various dictionaries). When one of the parts of the modifier is a proper noun or a proper adjective , there is no hyphen (e.g., "a South American actor"). When
5562-524: The closing quotation mark regardless. This rule varies for other punctuation marks; for example, American English follows the British English rule when it comes to semicolons, colons, question marks, and exclamation points. The serial comma is used much more often in the United States than in the UK. Other languages of Europe use much the same punctuation as English. The similarity is so strong that
5665-476: The colon, and the full point terminating the sentence. The marks of interrogation and admiration were introduced many years after. The introduction of electrical telegraphy with a limited set of transmission codes and typewriters with a limited set of keys influenced punctuation subtly. For example, curved quotes and apostrophes were all collapsed into two characters (' and "). The hyphen , minus sign , and dashes of various widths have been collapsed into
5768-426: The compound is a familiar one, it is usually unhyphenated. For example, some style guides prefer the construction high school students , to high-school students . Although the expression is technically ambiguous ("students of a high school"/"school students who are high"), it would normally be formulated differently if other than the first meaning were intended. Noun–noun compound modifiers may also be written without
5871-414: The dieresis as optional (as in naive and naïve ) despite the juxtaposition of a and i. Hyphens are occasionally used to denote syllabification , as in syl-la-bi-fi-ca-tion . Various British and North American dictionaries use an interpunct , sometimes called a "middle dot" or "hyphenation point", for this purpose, as in syl·la·bi·fi·ca·tion . This allows the hyphen to be reserved only for places where
5974-546: The direction of C. T. Onions, who succeeded Little as editor. Onions wrote that SOED was "to present in miniature all the features of the principal work" and to be "a quintessence of those vast materials" in the complete OED. The first edition was published in February 1933. It was reprinted in March and April of that year and again in 1934. The second edition appeared in 1936, contained about 3,000 revisions and additions, and
6077-615: The editorship of Lesley Brown 1980-1993 and was the first complete revision of the dictionary and should be considered a re-abridgement of the SOED and its supplements. The whole text was completely revised for the Fourth Edition, which was published in 1993 as the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary . The book attempted to include all English words which had substantial currency after 1700, plus
6180-422: The entire word to the next line. The word may be divided at the nearest break point between syllables ( syllabification ) and a hyphen inserted to indicate that the letters form a word fragment, rather than a full word. This allows more efficient use of paper, allows flush appearance of right-side margins ( justification ) without oddly large word spaces, and decreases the problem of rivers . This kind of hyphenation
6283-589: The few variations may confuse a native English reader. Quotation marks are particularly variable across European languages. For example, in French and Russian , quotes would appear as: « Je suis fatigué. » (In French, the quotation marks are spaced from the enclosed material; in Russian they are not.) In the French of France and Belgium , the marks ⟨:⟩ , ⟨;⟩ , ⟨?⟩ and ⟨!⟩ are preceded by
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#17327648306996386-620: The first expression is ordinarily open" (i.e., ordinarily two separate words). This is different, however, from instances where prefixes that are normally closed up (styled solidly) are used suspensively. For example, preoperative and postoperative becomes pre- and postoperative (not pre- and post-operative ) when suspended. Some editors prefer to avoid suspending such pairs, choosing instead to write out both words in full. A hyphen may be used to connect groups of numbers, such as in dates (see § Usage in date notation ), telephone numbers or sports scores . It can also be used to indicate
6489-426: The first modifier in a compound is an adverb ending in -ly (e.g., "a poorly written novel"), various style guides advise no hyphen. However, some do allow for this use. For example, The Economist Style Guide advises: "Adverbs do not need to be linked to participles or adjectives by hyphens in simple constructions ... Less common adverbs, including all those that end -ly , are less likely to need hyphens." In
6592-423: The first refers to a shark that eats people, and the second to a man who eats shark meat . A government-monitoring program is a program that monitors the government, whereas a government monitoring program is a government program that monitors something else. Some married couples compose a new surname (sometimes referred to as a double-barrelled name ) for their new family by combining their two surnames with
6695-496: The greater use and finally standardization of punctuation, which showed the relationships of words with each other: where one sentence ends and another begins, for example. The introduction of a standard system of punctuation has also been attributed to the Venetian printers Aldus Manutius and his grandson. They have been credited with popularizing the practice of ending sentences with the colon or full stop (period), inventing
6798-413: The guidance of the reader produced the colon and full point. In process of time, the comma was added, which was then merely a perpendicular line, proportioned to the body of the letter. These three points were the only ones used until the close of the fifteenth century, when Aldo Manuccio gave a better shape to the comma, and added the semicolon; the comma denoting the shortest pause, the semicolon next, then
6901-472: The hyphen is a single entity. In character encoding for use with computers, it is represented in Unicode by any of several characters . These include the dual-use hyphen-minus , the soft hyphen , the nonbreaking hyphen , and an unambiguous form known familiarly as the "Unicode hyphen", shown at the top of the infobox on this page. The character most often used to represent a hyphen (and the one produced by
7004-431: The hyphen, there is potential confusion about whether the writer means a "player of American football" or an "American player of football" and whether the writer means paintings that are "little celebrated" or "celebrated paintings" that are little. Compound modifiers can extend to three or more words, as in ice-cream-flavored candy , and can be adverbial as well as adjectival ( spine-tinglingly frightening ). However, if
7107-651: The hyphenated variant of these words is often more common (as in shell-like instead of shelllike ). Closed-up style is avoided in some cases: possible homographs , such as recreation (fun or sport) versus re-creation (the act of creating again), retreat (turn back) versus re-treat (give therapy again), and un-ionized (not in ion form) versus unionized (organized into trade unions ); combinations with proper nouns or adjectives ( un-American , de-Stalinisation ); acronyms ( anti-TNF antibody , non-SI units ); or numbers ( pre-1949 diplomacy , pre-1492 cartography ). Although proto-oncogene
7210-477: The introduction of letter spacing in the Middle Ages , the hyphen, still written beneath the text, reversed its meaning. Scribes used the mark to connect two words that had been incorrectly separated by a space. This era also saw the introduction of the marginal hyphen, for words broken across lines. The modern format of the hyphen originated with Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, c. 1455 with
7313-432: The key on a keyboard) is called the "hyphen-minus" by Unicode, deriving from the original ASCII standard, where it was called "hyphen (minus)". The word is derived from Ancient Greek ὑφ' ἕν ( huph' hén ), contracted from ὑπό ἕν ( hypó hén ), "in one" (literally "under one"). An (ἡ) ὑφέν ( (he) hyphén ) was an undertie -like ‿ sign written below two adjacent letters to indicate that they belong to
7416-402: The language, location , register , and time . In online chat and text messages punctuation is used tachygraphically , especially among younger users. Punctuation marks, especially spacing , were not needed in logographic or syllabic (such as Chinese and Mayan script ) texts because disambiguation and emphasis could be communicated by employing a separate written form distinct from
7519-528: The late 10th century, probably during the Benedictine reform movement, but was not adopted until after the Norman conquest . The original positurae were the punctus , punctus elevatus , punctus versus , and punctus interrogativus , but a fifth symbol, the punctus flexus , was added in the 10th century to indicate a pause of a value between the punctus and punctus elevatus . In
7622-490: The late 11th/early 12th century the punctus versus disappeared and was taken over by the simple punctus (now with two distinct values). The late Middle Ages saw the addition of the virgula suspensiva (slash or slash with a midpoint dot) which was often used in conjunction with the punctus for different types of pauses. Direct quotations were marked with marginal diples, as in Antiquity, but from at least
7725-450: The late 19th and early 20th centuries, but it was never applied extensively across the language: only a handful of diaereses, including coöperation and Brontë , are encountered with any appreciable frequency in English; thus reëxamine , reïterate , deëmphasize , etc. are seldom encountered. In borrowings from Modern French, whose orthography utilizes the diaeresis as a means to differentiate graphemes , various English dictionaries list
7828-455: The latter characters are unavailable (such as type-written or ASCII-only text), where they take effort to enter (via dialog boxes or multi-key keyboard shortcuts ), or when the writer is unaware of the distinction. Consequently, some writers use two or three hyphen-minuses ( -- or --- ) to represent an em dash. In the TeX typesetting languages, a single hyphen-minus ( - ) renders a hyphen,
7931-411: The modified noun), although not in predicative position (after the modified noun). This is applied whether numerals or words are used for the numbers. Thus 28-year-old woman and twenty-eight-year-old woman or 32-foot wingspan and thirty-two-foot wingspan , but the woman is 28 years old and a wingspan of 32 feet . However, with symbols for SI units (such as m or kg )—in contrast to
8034-414: The most formal texts. It may be necessary to distinguish an incidental line-break hyphen from one integral to a word being mentioned (as when used in a dictionary ) or present in an original text being quoted (when in a critical edition ), not only to control its word wrap behavior (which encoding handles with hard and soft hyphens having the same glyph ) but also to differentiate appearance (with
8137-440: The norm in certain compound-modifier constructions and, among some authors, with certain prefixes (see below ). Hyphenation is also routinely used as part of syllabification in justified texts to avoid unsightly spacing (especially in columns with narrow line lengths , as when used with newspapers ). When flowing text, it is sometimes preferable to break a word into two so that it continues on another line rather than moving
8240-510: The original Morse code did not have an exclamation point. These simplifications have been carried forward into digital writing, with teleprinters and the ASCII character set essentially supporting the same characters as typewriters. Treatment of whitespace in HTML discouraged the practice (in English prose) of putting two full spaces after a full stop, since a single or double space would appear
8343-454: The parallelism of early-stage disease and early-onset disease . Similarly, the hyphen in little-celebrated paintings clarifies that one is not speaking of little paintings. Hyphens are usually used to connect numbers and words in modifying phrases. Such is the case when used to describe dimensional measurements of weight, size, and time, under the rationale that, like other compound modifiers, they take hyphens in attributive position (before
8446-592: The placement of hyphens to mark attributive phrases: In the ASCII character encoding, the hyphen (or minus) is character 45 10 . As Unicode is identical to ASCII (the 1967 version) for all encodings up to 127 10 , the number 45 10 (2D 16 ) is also assigned to this character in Unicode, where it is denoted as U+002D - HYPHEN-MINUS . Unicode has, in addition, other encodings for minus and hyphen characters: U+2212 − MINUS SIGN and U+2010 ‐ HYPHEN , respectively. The unambiguous § "Unicode hyphen" at U+2010
8549-412: The practice of word separation . Likewise, insular scribes adopted the distinctiones system while adapting it for minuscule script (so as to be more prominent) by using not differing height but rather a differing number of marks—aligned horizontally (or sometimes triangularly)—to signify a pause's duration: one mark for a minor pause, two for a medium one, and three for a major one. Most common were
8652-438: The publication of his 42-line Bible . His tools did not allow for a sublinear hyphen, and he thus moved it to the middle of the line. Examination of an original copy on vellum (Hubay index #35) in the U. S. Library of Congress shows that Gutenberg's movable type was set justified in a uniform style, 42 equal lines per page. The Gutenberg printing press required words made up of individual letters of type to be held in place by
8755-489: The punctuation of traditional typesetting, writing forms like text messages tend to use the simplified ASCII style of punctuation, with the addition of new non-text characters like emoji . Informal text speak tends to drop punctuation when not needed, including some ways that would be considered errors in more formal writing. In the computer era, punctuation characters were recycled for use in programming languages and URLs . Due to its use in email and Twitter handles,
8858-465: The result of marriage. For example Julia Louis-Dreyfus is a descendant of Louis Lemlé Dreyfus whose son was Léopold Louis-Dreyfus. Connecting hyphens are used in a large number of miscellaneous compounds, other than modifiers, such as in lily-of-the-valley , cock-a-hoop , clever-clever , tittle-tattle and orang-utan . Use is often dictated by convention rather than fixed rules, and hyphenation styles may vary between authors; for example, orang-utan
8961-440: The right at a 60-degree angle. The English language does not have definitive hyphenation rules, though various style guides provide detailed usage recommendations and have a significant amount of overlap in what they advise. Hyphens are mostly used to break single words into parts or to join ordinarily separate words into single words. Spaces are not placed between a hyphen and either of the elements it connects except when using
9064-411: The same on the screen. (Most style guides now discourage double spaces, and some electronic writing tools, including Misplaced Pages's software, automatically collapse double spaces to single.) The full traditional set of typesetting tools became available with the advent of desktop publishing and more sophisticated word processors . Despite the widespread adoption of character sets like Unicode that support
9167-409: The same word when it was necessary to avoid ambiguity, before word spacing was practiced. The first known documentation of the hyphen is in the grammatical works of Dionysius Thrax . At the time hyphenation was joining two words that would otherwise be read separately by a low tie mark between the two words. In Greek these marks were known as enotikon , officially romanized as a hyphen. With
9270-624: The sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary removed the hyphens from 16,000 entries, such as fig-leaf (now fig leaf ), pot-belly (now pot belly ), and pigeon-hole (now pigeonhole ). The increasing prevalence of computer technology and the advent of the Internet have given rise to a subset of common nouns that might have been hyphenated in the past (e.g., toolbar , hyperlink , and pastebin ). Despite decreased use, hyphenation remains
9373-476: The spoken form of the language. Ancient Chinese classical texts were transmitted without punctuation. However, many Warring States period bamboo texts contain the symbols ⟨└⟩ and ⟨▄⟩ indicating the end of a chapter and full stop , respectively. By the Song dynasty , the addition of punctuation to texts by scholars to aid comprehension became common. During antiquity, most scribes in
9476-403: The time of pause A sentence doth require at ev'ry clause. At ev'ry comma, stop while one you count; At semicolon, two is the amount; A colon doth require the time of three ; The period four , as learned men agree. The use of punctuation was not standardised until after the invention of printing. According to the 1885 edition of The American Printer , the importance of punctuation
9579-482: The unhyphenated spelling resembles another word or when the affixation is deemed misinterpretable, ambiguous, or somehow "odd-looking" (for example, having two consecutive monographs that look like the digraphs of English, like e+a, e+e, or e+i). However, the unhyphenated style, which is also called closed up or solid , is usually preferred, particularly when the derivative has been relatively familiarized or popularized through extensive use in various contexts. As
9682-505: The vocabulary included entries in general English from 1700 to the present day and in earlier major literary works. The dictionary included 80,000 quotations illustrating the use of words, thousands of newly discovered antedatings based on the continuing research for the OED, 2,500 new words and senses, thousands of antedatings of existing words from Oxford English Dictionary and Oxford English Corpus, many new quotations from then-recent authors, and
9785-565: The vocabulary of Shakespeare , John Milton , Edmund Spenser and the King James Version . As a historical dictionary, it includes obsolete words if they are used by major authors and earlier meanings where they explain the development of a word. Headwords are traced back to their earliest usage. Includes 97,600 headwords, 25,250 variant spellings, 500,000 definitions, 87,400 illustrative quotations and 7,333 sources of quotations (including 5,519 individual authors). The fifth edition
9888-412: The way in which they handle quotation marks, particularly in conjunction with other punctuation marks. In British English, punctuation marks such as full stops and commas are placed inside the quotation mark only if they are part of what is being quoted, and placed outside the closing quotation mark if part of the containing sentence. In American English, however, such punctuation is generally placed inside
9991-443: Was filed, and published in 1992 under World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) number WO9219458, for two new punctuation marks: the "question comma" and the "exclamation comma". The question comma has a comma instead of the dot at the bottom of a question mark, while the exclamation comma has a comma in place of the point at the bottom of an exclamation mark. These were intended for use as question and exclamation marks within
10094-466: Was introduced, allowing such manual specification of a place where a hyphenated break is allowed but not forced . That is, it does not force a line break in an inconvenient place when the text is later reflowed. Soft hyphens are inserted into the text at the positions where hyphenation may occur. It can be a tedious task to insert the soft hyphens by hand, and tools using hyphenation algorithms are available that do this automatically. Current modules of
10197-528: Was not used in Chinese , Japanese , Korean and Vietnamese Chu Nom writing until the adoption of punctuation from the West in the late 19th and early 20th century. In unpunctuated texts, the grammatical structure of sentences in classical writing is inferred from context. Most punctuation marks in modern Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have similar functions to their English counterparts; however, they often look different and have different customary rules. In
10300-492: Was noted in various sayings by children, such as: Charles the First walked and talked Half an hour after his head was cut off . With a semicolon and a comma added, it reads as follows: Charles the First walked and talked; Half an hour after, his head was cut off. In a 19th-century manual of typography , Thomas MacKellar writes: Shortly after the invention of printing, the necessity of stops or pauses in sentences for
10403-536: Was published in 2002, and contains more than half a million definitions, with 83,500 illustrative quotations from 7,000 authors. The name Shorter Oxford English Dictionary was used to emphasize the link between this two-volume dictionary and the original twenty-volume OED. On 21 September 2007, the sixth edition appeared. The dictionary now included 600,000 words, phrases, and definitions, covering global English-speaking regions and 2500 new words and meanings from Oxford Dictionaries and Oxford English Corpus. As previously,
10506-474: Was reprinted in 1939. The third edition was published in the United States under the name The Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles in 1944 with reprints in 1947, 1950, 1952, and 1955. The 1955 reprint contained an addendum of new entries. The 1973 reprint contained an enlarged addenda with over seventy pages and a major revision of all the etymologies. The New SOED was prepared under
10609-414: Was rhetorical, to aid reading aloud. As explained by writer and editor Lynne Truss , "The rise of printing in the 14th and 15th centuries meant that a standard system of punctuation was urgently required." Printed books, whose letters were uniform, could be read much more rapidly than manuscripts. Rapid reading, or reading aloud, did not allow time to analyze sentence structures. This increased speed led to
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