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I would like to know exactly where (or whether) "the right hand side", "the left hand wall", etc. should be hyphenated.

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  • Nothing about this question has remotely to do with grammar. Please use more accurate tags in the future. Thank you.
    – RegDwigнt
    Commented Dec 17, 2014 at 11:01

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The word "righthand" is perhaps used somewhere, but it is not recognized by the Oxford Dictionary 12th edition Concise. It's up to you which authoritative reference you wish to adhere to. The important thing is to be consistent throughout, so your readers will know what terms you are using and why. If you stick to the Oxford Dictionary as reference, then the use of a hyphen simply follows the rule of attributive (before the noun) or predictive (after the noun) adjectives. That is to say:

The right-hand side of the entrance. The wall on the right hand. In this sense, I guess most of your usage would be with the hyphen.

Confusion or ambiguity should be eliminated by use of additional phrases: (the right-hand side of the entrance as faced from the outside by the observer..........or something less clumsy - for you to reflect over).

But, finally, wouldn't it be simpler just to use "right side" and "left side" "On the right side of the entrance" ?

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Do whatever you please; all three of

  1. right hand
  2. right-hand
  3. righthand

are readily encountered in the wild. It’s possible that right-hand is the variant currently the most used, but your environment may not share this predilection.

But I have a better suggestion: omit hand altogether.

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    Right on its own can be ambiguous, given that right also means correct. "Make sure you walk along the right wall" could mean "avoid the left wall" or "avoid the wrong wall".
    – stib
    Commented Dec 17, 2014 at 4:57
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    @stib Theoretical ambiguity of a single completely context-free term doesn’t really count much when it comes to real-world uses. Your ambiguity would be unlikely to arise in the actual contexts it would be found in, and therefore the extra word can nearly always be safely omitted
    – tchrist ♦
    Commented Dec 17, 2014 at 5:26
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    @tchrist There are actual circumstances where you really have to include "hand", e.g. the "Right-hand rule" in Physics (electromagnetism).
    – Deepak
    Commented Dec 17, 2014 at 6:35
  • @Deepak yes, and this is a situation where the attempt of removing ambiguity actually introduces an ambiguity (!) since we are here referring to a real hand (it indicates a convention in which the direction of vectors is given by three fingers), so in this sense right-hand and right hand have different meaning. Same if I say "I put the ring on the finger of my left hand"
    – Vincenzooo
    Commented Oct 15, 2018 at 5:53
  • In other words, adding "hand" to indicate the side, only shift the ambiguity to other cases, the only way to completely remove ambiguity is hyphenate, but I agree it is irrelevant, it would be much easier (but I don't know if correct, or "right") to just say right and left, it is always clear from context and then should we eliminate all words with more than one meaning? BTW, also left, has a double meaning.
    – Vincenzooo
    Commented Oct 15, 2018 at 5:56

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