Overview
Compound words in English are words that are joined into one word such as airplane, footnote, and notebook. Hyphens may be used to join adjectives used before the nouns they modify, and proper names.
Compounding Words
Compound words are word that are joined to form another word with a different meaning. For example, butterfly has a different meaning than either butter or fly, baseball has a different meaning than either base or ball, and notebook has a different meaning than either note or book. Compound words tend to change over time, as they will often start out as hyphenated phrases and then eventually drop the hyphen. At one time, compound words such as firefly were written as fire-fly and secondhand as second-hand. Some compound phrases are still in an open form, such as post office, real estate, and peanut butter. Since the rules are not always hard and fast, consult an up-to-date dictionary.
Hyphens in Compound Phrases
Some compound phrases are hyphenated, such as mother-in-law apartment or hand-to-hand combat. However, others are not always hyphenated, such as in the sentence “She was chosen editor in chief of the school paper”. If a name is hyphenated, it is alphabetized as one name, such as Sheila Kaye-Smith under the letter K.
Hyphens in Adjectives
When words form a compound adjective before the noun they modify, they are hyphenated, such as deep-blue sea, house-to-house search, and wall-to-wall carpeting. In general, compound adjectives involving ages or numbers are also hyphenated before the noun, such as the six-year-old child, 150-yard dash, and 7- day trip. When the compound adjective comes after the noun, it is not hyphenated. Janie is six years old on Tuesday. The building is exactly four stories tall.
Hyphens to Clarify Meaning
Most of the time, hyphens are not used with prefixes, such as bicoastal, foreclosure, and retroactive. However, they are used if the combined word contains two vowels, such as co-editor or semi-independent. Hyphens are also used if the result would be otherwise confusing, such as co-op, re-cover for covering again, or re-counted, as the votes were re-counted.
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