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Reg Gothard - "Yonder Pedant"

Hyphenation

This is part two of a four- or five-part series on dashes and hyphens that is intended to replace an earlier article.

Part one deals purely with the mechanics of producing a given dash/rule/sign/glyph in a document using four MS Office products; Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Publisher. Part two (this article) deals with hyphenation, the different kinds of hyphen, and how and where to use hyphens. Parts 3–4 deal with en dashes and em dashes respectively.

Characters in Scope

This article looks at the following.

  • Regular hyphens
  • Non-breaking hyphens
  • Optional hyphens, aka soft hyphens, aka discretionary hyphens

All three hyphens look identical when printed (or displayed in print preview mode on-screen). The difference between each is how the word processing software (Word, web browser, etc.) interprets and acts upon them.

Part one of this series contains reasonably comprehensive information about how to type or create each type of hyphen.

What’s the Purpose of Hyphens?

Hyphens are used both to separate words and to associate them.

Hyphens are used to split words across lines.

Hyphens are also one of the actors in the ongoing evolution towards closed compounds (e.g. on line to on-line to online), a topic discussed here. This evolution is constant and in some cases, rapid, so if in doubt, consult an online dictionary for your variety of English. (If anyone knows of a free online Canadian dictionary, please let me know! $300.00 per year for access to the The Oxford English Dictionary is outside my budget.)

Confusion is rife regarding where, when and how to hyphenate. The following may help.

Hyphenate Where/When

…you want to disambiguate. An old-furniture restorer is not the same as an old furniture restorer.

…you want to use complex/compound adjectives. “The popcorn eating people in the cinema” conjures up images of a very poor “B” movie. “The popcorn-eating people in the cinema” clears things up nicely. “An inclusive, non faith specific name…” is just plain confusing. An “inclusive, non-faith-specific name…” makes sense.

…you want to qualify a word with two or more preceding words. “There are many ice and snow-related festivals…” is wrong. “There are many ice- and snow-related festivals…” ties “ice” to “related” for the reader.

…you need to separate letters or numbers. Phone numbers may be separated with hyphens (e.g. 403-555-5555). ISBNs can also be separated with hyphens. Note however that a special character—the figure dash—is the correct character to use in these situations.

If you want to spell something out, perhaps in direct speech, you would separate the letters with hyphens; for example, “Where did you put the gifts from s-a-n-t-a?”

…you need to write out numbers from 21 to 99. Twenty-one; forty-three; eighty-seven.

…you need to split a word across lines. Word processors will do this for you, if you set your options to allow it. When you have your paragraph attributes set so that the text gets aligned to both the left and right margins, dividing words with a hyphen becomes useful, especially if your writing contains many longer words or you are working within small line widths.

Splitting Words

There is quite a long list of guidelines for where a break should occur in a word. Here are a few of the more commonly-applied ones. Remember they are guidelines, not unbreakable rules.

  • Do not divide words of fewer than six letters.
  • Do not divide words and leave a single letter on its own.
  • Divide according to pronunciation, i.e., at a syllable boundary. (lots of exceptions)
  • Do not divide words where one or both elements are words in their own right, but with different meanings from the original word (e.g. split “lunging” at “lun ging” not “lung ing”).
  • Do not separate numbers from their abbreviated units of measure.

If you are sufficiently interested in a fuller discussion, please consult a style guide such as The Canadian Style (section 2.17), The Chicago Manual of Style (Sections 7.31–7.43 of 16th edition) or New Hart’s Rules (section 3.4 of 2014 edition)

Compass points are hyphenated in British English, but joined in Canadian and American English. (UK: South-east; US/CAN: Southeast.) Intermediate compass point prefixes are hyphenated thus: south-south-east (UK) and south-southeast (US/CAN).

How to Hyphenate

Regular Hyphens

Regular hyphens are the WYSIWYG of hyphens. You type the “-“ character, and that’s what you get, wherever it may fall on a line of text. Word processors will try to use them to split words in order to wrap to a second line if such action is needed. Those same word processors will insert a hyphen for you if you have the appropriate options selected and they determine that one is needed.

How to Access Hyphenation Options in MS Word

Hyphenation Options - MS Word

How to Access Hyphenation Options in MS Word

 

Hyphenation in MS Publisher

Hyphenation in MS Publisher

How to Access Hyphenation Options in MS Publisher

If you want to have control over where hyphens appear, you will need to use non-breaking hyphens and/or soft hyphens. The manual options in the screenshots above can help you with soft hyphens, and you can use the shortcut keys mentioned in the following two sub-sections.

Non-breaking Hyphens

A non-breaking hyphen keeps the text either side of it together on the same line. This is useful in situations such as when dates are formatted with hyphens (e.g. 2016-03-07); non-breaking hyphens ensure that the entire date will appear on the same line. Another example of its use would be to keep the commas with the hyphens in “two-, three-, and four-ply tissue”.

In MS Word and MS Publisher, you can type a non-breaking hyphen using CTRL + SHIFT + _ . There are other methods that work for these and other MS Office products; these are listed here.

Soft Hyphens

Also known as an optional hyphen or a discretionary hyphen, this character allows you to specify where a word or string of characters may split if the software deems a split necessary.

In MS Word and MS Publisher, you can type a non-breaking hyphen using CTRL + (the “-“ on the main keyboard, not the numeric keypad). There are other methods that work for these and other MS Office products; these are listed here.

The Long and Short

I have used this quotation elsewhere on my website, but it bears repetition: “If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad.” Despite that dire warning, I believe that knowing how to use soft and non-breaking hyphens helps avoid confusion caused by splits being placed in the wrong places. And having an appreciation for the guidelines for word-splitting also helps avoid confusion.

If you gather three writers or editors in a room and give them each the same piece of hyphen-laced text, you will get three different edits. Guaranteed. But there will be agreement on places where all three would expect hyphens, and places where all three would expect not to see hyphens; those are the ones that this article has striven to help you get right.

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