Hyphen
[6] With the introduction of letter spacing in the Middle Ages, the hyphen, still written beneath the text, reversed its meaning.
[7] The modern format of the hyphen originated with Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, c. 1455 with the publication of his 42-line Bible.
[8] Examination of an original copy on vellum (Hubay index #35) in the U. S. Library of Congress shows that Gutenberg's movable type was set justified in a uniform style, 42 equal lines per page.
The Gutenberg printing press required words made up of individual letters of type to be held in place by a surrounding nonprinting rigid frame.
Gutenberg solved the problem of making each line the same length to fit the frame by inserting a hyphen as the last element at the right-side margin.
[citation needed] The English language does not have definitive hyphenation rules,[9] though various style guides provide detailed usage recommendations and have a significant amount of overlap in what they advise.
Style conventions that apply to hyphens (and dashes) have evolved to support ease of reading in complex constructions; editors often accept deviations if they aid rather than hinder easy comprehension.
Reflecting this changing usage, in 2007, the sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary removed the hyphens from 16,000 entries, such as fig-leaf (now fig leaf), pot-belly (now pot belly), and pigeon-hole (now pigeonhole).
[10] The increasing prevalence of computer technology and the advent of the Internet have given rise to a subset of common nouns that might have been hyphenated in the past (e.g., toolbar, hyperlink, and pastebin).
Hyphenation is also routinely used as part of syllabification in justified texts to avoid unsightly spacing (especially in columns with narrow line lengths, as when used with newspapers).
It may be necessary to distinguish an incidental line-break hyphen from one integral to a word being mentioned (as when used in a dictionary) or present in an original text being quoted (when in a critical edition), not only to control its word wrap behavior (which encoding handles with hard and soft hyphens having the same glyph) but also to differentiate appearance (with a different glyph).
[13] The Concise Oxford Dictionary (fifth edition) suggested repeating an integral hyphen at the start of the following line.
[14] Prefixes (such as de-, pre-, re-, and non-[15]) and suffixes (such as -less, -like, -ness, and -hood) are sometimes hyphenated, especially when the unhyphenated spelling resembles another word or when the affixation is deemed misinterpretable, ambiguous, or somehow "odd-looking" (for example, having two consecutive monographs that look like the digraphs of English, like e+a, e+e, or e+i).
However, the unhyphenated style, which is also called closed up or solid, is usually preferred, particularly when the derivative has been relatively familiarized or popularized through extensive use in various contexts.
Closed-up style is avoided in some cases: possible homographs, such as recreation (fun or sport) versus re-creation (the act of creating again), retreat (turn back) versus re-treat (give therapy again), and un-ionized (not in ion form) versus unionized (organized into trade unions); combinations with proper nouns or adjectives (un-American, de-Stalinisation);[16][17] acronyms (anti-TNF antibody, non-SI units); or numbers (pre-1949 diplomacy, pre-1492 cartography).
Although proto-oncogene is still hyphenated by both Dorland's and Merriam-Webster's Medical, the solid (that is, unhyphenated) styling (protooncogene) is a common variant, particularly among oncologists and geneticists.
[citation needed] A diaeresis may also be used in a like fashion, either to separate and mark off monographs (as in coöperation) or to signalize a vocalic terminal e (for example, Brontë).
This use of the diaeresis peaked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but it was never applied extensively across the language: only a handful of diaereses, including coöperation and Brontë, are encountered with any appreciable frequency in English; thus reëxamine, reïterate, deëmphasize, etc.
In borrowings from Modern French, whose orthography utilizes the diaeresis as a means to differentiate graphemes, various English dictionaries list the dieresis as optional (as in naive and naïve) despite the juxtaposition of a and i.
Various British and North American dictionaries use an interpunct, sometimes called a "middle dot" or "hyphenation point", for this purpose, as in syl·la·bi·fi·ca·tion.
[20] Compound modifiers can extend to three or more words, as in ice-cream-flavored candy, and can be adverbial as well as adjectival (spine-tinglingly frightening).
Noun–noun compound modifiers may also be written without a hyphen when no confusion is likely: grade point average and department store manager.
[24] When the first modifier in a compound is an adverb ending in -ly (e.g., "a poorly written novel"), various style guides advise no hyphen.
[25] The hyphen in "well-[past_participled] noun", such as in "well-differentiated cells", might reasonably be judged superfluous (the syntax is unlikely to be misinterpreted), yet plenty of style guides call for it.
When an object is compounded with a verbal noun, such as egg-beater (a tool that beats eggs), the result is sometimes hyphenated.
Some authors do this consistently, others only for disambiguation; in this case, egg-beater, egg beater, and eggbeater are all common.
Connecting hyphens are used in a large number of miscellaneous compounds, other than modifiers, such as in lily-of-the-valley, cock-a-hoop, clever-clever, tittle-tattle and orang-utan.
Nevertheless, in many spreadsheet and programming applications the hyphen-minus must be typed to indicate subtraction, as use of the Unicode minus sign will not be recognised.
The hyphen-minus is often used instead of dashes or minus signs in situations where the latter characters are unavailable (such as type-written or ASCII-only text), where they take effort to enter (via dialog boxes or multi-key keyboard shortcuts), or when the writer is unaware of the distinction.
[36] Use of hyphens to delineate the parts of a written date (rather than the slashes used conventionally in Anglophone countries) is specified in the international standard ISO 8601.
