Hyphen

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. A hyphen looks like this: -. Hyphens have many uses in writing.

Son-in-law is an example of a hyphenated word. The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes which are longer and have different uses, or with the minus sign. The hyphen is the shortest of these signs.

 Some words can have a hyphen added to change the meaning. For example, re-form means "start again" but reform means "change". A re-formed group is different from a reformed group.
 A hyphen is used to spell out some numbers (thirty-two, forty-nine, eighty-six).
 When a name for a material such as "stainless steel" is used with a word for a thing made of that material, a hyphen may be used, as in "stainless-steel knife".
 Some words have letters at the beginning, or prefixes, these can sometimes use hyphens: un-American, anti-pollution, non-proliferation
 When spelling out a word: H-Y-P-H-E-N
 In some cases, when putting two words together would be hard to understand. For example, if something is like a shell, writing it as "shelllike" is hard to read with so many uses of the letter 'l'. It is better to use "shell-like."
 When writing words that someone has spoken when that person has difficulty speaking, as in: "I reached for the w-w-w-watering can." This is called a stammer.
 When adding words that already have a hyphen. For example: two to year-old as in: "He was a two- or three-year-old dog."
 If a word for a person (a name or proper noun) is used with another name, a hyphen is used, such as "the Merriam-Webster dictionary" or "the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact."
 Some people take a name from the family names of both parents, or from the last name of their father and husband. For example: "John Rees-Williams". This is not always the case, for example: "Hillary Rodham Clinton".
 A hyphen is also used when a word is too long to fit in one row of writing. This is often done in books, magazines and newspapers to save space and paper. A long word is broken into two parts, of nearly the same length, with a hyphen at the end of the first part. The normal way is to make the first part of the word as much of a complete word as possible. For example:

GoodNot so goodWhat was done was not good, not help-
ful, nor was it very useful.What was done was not good, not hel-
pful, nor was it very useful.
Related pages
 Punctuation

References

Category:Punctuation