Hyphen Mighty

With a Dash of Other Dashes

Quick Note—

Before I get going, it’s my pleasure to let you know that my short story, “Assistance,” will appear in The Quiet Reader magazine later this month. Make sure you visit them now and familiarize yourself with their site so you will be prepared when I alert you that the sixth edition issue has launched.

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Today we are talking about a few of my favorite things, which actually is not so different from any other Shelf Life day, as I have a lot of favorite things. All things grammar are my favorite things. Being persnickety about grammar when I have the right kind of opportunity to do so is definitely up there among my favorite things.

The right kind of opportunity is one that doesn’t put other people down. Correcting people’s spelling and grammar unprompted, in everyday life, is—for lack of a better phrase—a jerk move. If you are just having a pleasant conversation with people (in person or virtually) and grammar, spelling, and language are not the focus of the discussion, there is just no reason to be pedantic about somebody’s grammar. Remember, prescriptive grammar is colonial and there’s no one, true, correct English language, anyway.

To that end, the only grammar I correct is my own or that of the people whose work I help publish for money or love. Otherwise, I see “incorrect” grammar, spelling, punctuation, and so on, on the internet and in emails, and somehow I let it pass me by without correcting someone who did not ask for my opinion on their language use and doesn’t need or want it. 

In other words, if you see a misspelled word in a Tweet—no you didn’t. Did you understand what the writer meant? Yes? Then it doesn’t matter.

But when I am writing Shelf Life for edutainment purposes, there’s no reason not to share some of the grammar knowledge that is taking up valuable real estate inside my skull because people expect to see that here, sometimes people even enjoy it, and I’m not forcing my prescriptivist colonial grammar regime on anyone. 

So today I am writing about the mighty hyphen; how to know when to use it versus its near-cousins, the en and em dashes, and when to use none of the above (plus some alternatives to the en and em).

When I say “hyphen mighty” I’m making a play on a turn of phrase but the hyphen is among the most impactful and hardworking of our punctuation glyphs in the English language, in my opinion. It’s used for lots of things but, chief among those, is to join words together.

When you see a hyphen break at the end of a line of text, it’s telling you “this stub of word at the end of the line joins with the stub of word at the beginning of the next line to form a single word.” When you see a hyphen creating a compound adjective, that tells you the two words have joined together to form one modifier instead of being read as two separate modifiers; consider the semantic difference between “a long, needed break” and “a long-needed break” (one describes a break that is both “long” and “needed” while the other describes a break that has been “needed” for a “long” time). Hyphens can also connect certain prefixes to words, such as all-knowing or self-care. And they connect spelled-out numbers together to form more complex numbers, like forty-two or three-fifths.

The secondary use of the hyphen is the opposite of joining, to separate. Sometimes a hyphen is used in a compound to avoid using the same letter twice in a row. For example, the prefix anti- is usually closed up to the word it follows (eg, antibody, antiseptic, antisocial), but a hyphen is inserted when the word it’s modifying begins with an i (eg, anti-immigrant, anti-ideological) to avoid the double i. The hyphen can also separate a prefix from a word when the second word must be capitalized, as in un-American or anti-Semitic. Further, the hyphen can be used to signify that a compound word is being used in a different sense than it’s usual meaning, for instance: re-collect (to collect again) versus recollect (to remember).

How to know when to use the hyphen or not use the hyphen, that is the question. There are a handful of rules that help me remember, and then there are resources I use to check specific instances when necessary. 

When forming compound adjectives, the simple rule is that if your compound adjective comes before the noun or noun phrase it modifies, then it should be hyphenated:

The well-regarded hair stylist was always booked far in advance.

In that example, the compound adjective well-regarded comes before and modifies the noun hair stylist, so it is hyphenated. When the same term appears after the noun phrase, it does not need to be hyphenated:

This hair stylist is always booked far in advance because he is so well regarded.

For prefixes, some of them never or rarely use a hyphen to connect to the word they modify (pre-, re-, non-) while some always use a hyphen to connect (all-, ex-, self-). Confusing things further, prefixes that tend to rarely or never use a hyphen to connect still find themselves subject to the rules above sometimes, but not always. For instance, reelect and preemptive have the double letter e but do not need a hyphen. When in doubt, you can cop out and consult the dictionary. Merriam-Webster online will be happy to show you whether to hyphenate a word or not. If they hyphenate it in their top-level heading (for example, see anti-immigrant) that means it’s hyphenated, and vice versa (see, for example, reenergize).

It’s not that important most of the time to be precise with your hyphens. If you write antiimmigrant or re-energize, readers will understand and know what you mean. But when you want to hyphenate precisely, this is how to do it.

There’s another use of the hyphen I didn’t mention yet, because it is contentious. Under some style manuals, this is a job for the en dash while under others the good old hyphen is still your go-to glyph. That is connecting things—usually but not always numbers—together to form ranges, for example:

• Pages 13–44

• The years 1979–1986

• Cancer stages I–IIIb

• The months June–August

• The Chicago–New York flight

Under the Chicago Manual of Style (and some others), the en dash is used to split out number ranges: “pages 13–44” rather than “pages 13-44”; other style manuals, such as American Medical Association, use hyphens to express ranges. I’d like to note, while I’m on the topic, that in running text I always (under any manual) prefer a word to a hyphen or en dash to express a range, as in, “pages 13 to 44,” “the months of June through August,” “cancer stages I through IIIb.” The hyphenated expression is better suited for tables, figures, captions, legends, keys, indexes, and inside parentheses.

The other use of the en dash, which is shared by both CMS and AMA (and most style manuals), is to modify a compound modifier or another phrase that already has two or more words. This could be a hyphenated compound modifier—for instance, “small-cell” as in “small-cell lung cancer”—or an open compound like “World War II.” If you want to add a modifier to those compounds, you use an en dash to connect the modifier to the existing compound, for example: “non–small-cell lung cancer” and “post–World War II.” 

This creates a small but meaningful semantic difference versus using the hyphen. If I referenced “non-small-cell lung cancer” I might mean the cells are not small cells, because there’s no hierarchy to indicate which word is modifying which in non-small-cell, whereas “non–small-cell lung cancer” indicates that non– is modifying small-cell to indicate that the type of cancer is not small-cell; it is any other type of lung cancer.

Perhaps my least favorite compound modifier string would be something like post–World War II–era. At that point, just rewrite the sentence and say it another way, please (eg, “the years following World War II”).

If you’re on a PC you can type an en dash by holding down alt and tapping 0150 on your numpad (I believe on a Mac this would be option 0150). You can also copy it from your computer’s character map and paste it into a document. Outside of system tools, some word processors have menus or commands for inserting the en dash.

Under Chicago Manual, there is another use of the en dash that is fairly obscure, and which only the most pedantic would call you on. This is to denote an equivalent, bidirectional relationship between two things, as in “the Israel–Jordan Peace Treaty.” In this instance, “Israel–Jordan” does not represent a range—it’s not the treaty from Israel to Jordan (encompassing everything between). It’s a treaty between two equal parties, Israel and Jordan. Another example is “the US–Canada border” (the border shared equally by both countries).

That brings us to my final subject of the day, the em dash, which I think everyone who reads this—or anything I’ve written, including my day-to-day business emails—knows is my favorite punctuation. The em dash is a punctuation mark that is used the same way as the comma or, when used in pairs, the parentheses (or other brackets). Like a comma, it can indicate a brief pause in thought. Like a pair of commas or a pair of parentheses, it can set a remark off from the main sentence or indicate that a clause is additional or parenthetical. The em dash can also be used in place of a colon, to separate two clauses where the second illustrates or explains the first. You can even use it in place of a semicolon (but why would you, the semicolon is great and you already have so few opportunities to use it).

I love the em dash because it’s an all-around, multipurpose, handy punctuation mark. A lot of writers feel this way and we have varying levels of self-awareness about our overdependence on the em dash. Many of us should be using fewer em dashes; in my case, a lot fewer. 

If you’re on a PC you can type an em dash by holding down alt and tapping 0151 on your numpad (I believe on a Mac this would be option 0151). 

One final item—a sub-item under em dashes—is the three-em dash. That’s the punctuation you sometimes see in a bibliography (and pretty much nowhere else) to indicate “the same thing again,” as in:

1. Smith and Wesson. A Book About Guns. Tulsa, OK: Gun Press, 1999.

2. ———. Another Book About Guns. Boise, ID: Rifles R Us, 2001.

In the above example, the use of the three-em dash means “Smith and Wesson wrote this one, too.”

For those who are interested, the en dash gets its name because it is a dash equivalent in length to one en in typesetting, meaning, the width of the letter N in the same font. Likewise, the em dash is the length of one em, or the approximate width of the letter M in the same font. When communicating with typesetters, we also might ask them to, for instance, “indent one em right” which means “move this text to the right the approximate width of the letter M.” The typesetter does not have to measure this out or use spaces or tabs to get the right width; they have an en space and an em space at their disposal. 

You have these, too. If you open the character map on your computer you can use it to look through all the glyphs available in any given font. You will notice some of the boxes appear to be blank with no glyph in them. If you click in those boxes you will see that they are the special spaces like the em space, the en space, the hair space, the thin space, and the non-breaking space.

See you Thursday and happy hyphenating!

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