| hyphen (-) |
| Usage:
1. Use it with compound numbers. forty-seven and fifty-three 2. Use it to avoid confusion. re-sign a petition (to avoid confusing it with resign, as in "resign from a job") 3. Use it with the prefix non except in cases where the prefix has become part of the word. non-standard, non-American, non-verbal, non-stop nondescript, nonage, nonentity, nonsense 4. Use it to avoid an awkward combinations of letters. shell-like 5. Use it with the prefixes self, all, and ex (meaning former). self-possessed, all-inclusive, and ex-wife 6. Use it with the suffix elect. president-elect 7. Use it between a prefix and a capitalized word. pre-Civil War, mid-October, and Afro-Canadian 8. Use it to separate a prefix or a suffix from a number. mid-1980s and 60-ish 9. With abbreviations that use periods, retain the periods. U.S.-owned machinery 10. Use them between the letters of a spelled word. A native of Burnaby is a B-u-r-n-a-b-e-i-n-g. 11. Use hyphens with fractions only when the fraction is an adjective. Three-quarters of all car dealers eat potato chips (bad — here three-quarters is a noun, so it doesn't need a hyphen) Three quarters of all car dealers eat potato chips. (good) A three-quarters majority ate potato chips. (good — here it is an adjective, so it gets a hyphen) |
| Etymology: The word hyphen literally means "under one"; it derives from the Greek hypo, under + hen, one. |
| Oxford English Dictionary: Its first OED citation is from 1603: "He would have us to reade these two last words in one, by way of hyphen, thus." (Holland Plutarch's Mor., 41) |