Week 5 - Hyphens and Compound Words

This week we're going to talk about compound words, typically constructed by joining two words with a hyphen to form a new word. It's possible to find examples of various combinations, e.g. noun-noun, noun-adjective, verb-preposition, etc., and I'm not going to make any attempt to categorize them. There's a common thread, though, that runs through all these examples: people often forget to put in the hyphen. I'll mention a few examples (and there are many, many more) that I've run across recently and try to show why it's important to include the hyphen.

Here's an example in which there's a missing hyphen:

Bunny conducted a one day workshop last week.

Why is it important to say "one-day workshop" instead of "one day workshop?" The answer is that you're trying to construct a single adjective (one-day) that modifies the noun "workshop," and you want the new word to have a meaning distinct from the meanings of the two separate components. Hyphenating the two words to make a single adjective works nicely, because without the hyphen, neither of the two modifiers conveys even part of what you intended. In this case, "one workshop" and "day workshop" are meaningless, but "one-day workshop" says just what you want to say.

You don't always hyphenate pairs of adjectives modifying a noun. For example, the following sentence is fine:

David has a beautifully rounded elbow.

In this case, you might be tempted to hyphenate "beautifully rounded," but "beautifully" modifies "rounded," not "elbow," and "rounded elbow" does make sense by itself, so no hyphen is needed.

Final exam: how many hyphens should you add to

FASERS is a superbly engineered web based application?

The answer: "superbly engineered" is fine, but you need a hyphen in "web-based." [And technically, "web-based" should be "Web-based," since "Web" refers to the World-wide Web, a proper noun. And "World-wide" brings up another question: should that compound adjective be written "World-Wide," or "World-wide?" The answer: definitely "World-wide," since the hyphen makes "World-wide" a single word, and you don't put a capital letter in the middle of a word.]


Now let's move to another type of compound word, in which hyphenating a pair of words creates a compound noun. Here's an example:

After you log in to the application, create your parameter set-up using the pulldown menu.

I've included three opportunities for hyphenation in the example -- you could imagine writing the sentence as

After you log-in to the application, create your parameter set-up using the pull-down menu.

In fact, "log in" is correct and "log-in" is incorrect in this sentence, because "log in" is used a verb, not a noun. There is in fact a compound noun "log-in," which you'll also see written as "login" -- it's been used so much that it's now accepted (at least by some) as a new noun (but not a verb, mind you) in the English language. So in our example above, "set-up" is correct because it's a noun, but if "set up" were used as a verb, you wouldn't hyphenate it:

I used the pulldown menu to set up my parameters.

Finally, the compound adjective (or noun) "pull-down" has been used so much that most people omit the hyphen -- some of the newer dictionaries recognize "pulldown" (and, for that matter, "setup") as a legitimate word. So, to summarize, you should hyphenate compound adjectives, but not compound verbs -- the following sentence is correct:

Please see Marva when you check in at the check-in counter.