42
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, as quoted by the site below, you hyphenate if the compound adjective is before the noun and don't hyphenate if it is after the noun.
With compound adjectives formed from the adverb well and a participle (e.g., well-known), or from a phrase (e.g., up-to-date), you should use a hyphen (or hyphens) when the ...
34
Burchfield's 1998 edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage says under hyphen, listing its uses:
6 To represent a common second element in all but the last word of a list, e.g. two-, three-, or four-fold.
This usage is perfectly acceptable; and in some cases it's really essential as Edwin Ashworth has commented:
We really have to prepare the ground- ...
33
I like the spelling convention set in GCC Coding Convention:
"front end" (noun)
"front-end" (adjective)
22
BEFORE a noun, "almost-finished' is better, since it emphasizes that 'almost' is qualifying 'finished', not 'report'. Not important in this case, but compare 'longest living animal' with 'longest-living animal'.
21
According to this Google Ngram, both E-Commerce and E-commerce are valid and interchangeable:
Likewise, when not beginning a sentence (or in a headline, etc.), the term e-commerce is not capitalized:
e-commerce |ˈēˌkämərs|:
(noun) commercial transactions conducted electronically on the Internet.
See what happens when e-commerce is added to the ...
19
This is not really an answer because I'm also lost but I'd like to point out something that seems to be overlooked in these three ways to write "runtime", "run time" or "run-time".
I would risk saying that all three mean different things, that I believe should be applied in different cases:
run time: this is how much time your program took to execute. If, ...
18
Many writers would use a suspended hyphen.
Medium- to long-term.
You're allowed some discretion on this matter, as reputable writers are not entirely homogenous in their hyphen usage. Between the two that you suggested, the second seems to be more defensible. Writing "medium-to-long term" is probably not achieving what you're trying to achieve with the ...
17
The Chicago Manual of Style notes:
With the exception of proper nouns (such as United States) and
compounds formed by an adverb ending in ly plus an adjective, it is
never incorrect to hyphenate adjectival compounds [of which
object-oriented is one] before a noun. When such compounds
follow the noun they modify, hyphenation is usually unnecessary,...
17
While I would say the third of your options, "non-defect-source-assesment processes", is most correct, I would strongly suggest trying to rephrase the subject for clarity. The hyphens can be used to indicate at what level the negation applies, so in this case "defect source assessment" is being negated, but "processes" is not. This is appropriate because you ...
17
"almost-finished" is a compound adjective. It is the correct way to say
"I am attaching an almost-finished version of the report".
"almost finished" is not correct in this case. Here's a sentence where you would use "almost finished" without the hyphen:
"I am almost finished with the work."
16
English documents written in India often use :-. For example:
Tatkal tickets shall be issued only on production of one of the ten prescribed proofs of identity shown under (as mentioned in Commercial Circular No.68 of 2012 issued vide letter No.2011/TG-I/20/P/ID dated 01.11.2012) as per procedure explained below:-
The details of medical camps conducted by ...
16
One thing some style manuals suggest in this case is to use an en-dash rather than a hyphen. So
North America–based company
rather than
North America-based company.
The longer dash signals that it shouldn't be parsed as "America-based".
16
According to dictionary.com, it should be two separate words "time slot".
This useful article on compound words offers the following advice:
Many of them are found in the dictionary and are not subject to our
interpretation, our judgment, or our whim. Start with your dictionary
before applying any other guidelines.
I would be inclined to follow that ...
15
Bryan Garner, Garner's Modern American Usage (2003) has a useful discussion of this problem in his lengthy coverage of phrasal adjectives:
E. The Compound Conundrum. When the first or last element in a phrasal adjective is part of a compound noun, it too needs to be hyphenated: post-cold-war norms, not post-cold war norms. Otherwise, as in that example, ...
13
There's a lot to hyphenation rules. There's even more to hyphenation styles, because there's some leeway in the rules but you want to be reasonably consistent in how you handle that lee-way. For this reason, I'm going to just take the case of a coinage for a modifier, as both case-by-case and crack-resistant are examples of that case, and compound nouns, as ...
13
I'm the woman from the video.
Saying 'tac' isn't silly at all. I grew up in a military family, so this was used regularly when speaking of a dash. Without getting into details, my father was in many fields where he was required to spell out commands via a speaking system, and they used tac. In school, we used 'dash'. Generally, I use tac when referring to ...
13
Prepositive modifiers don't like to have postpositive dependents. The more common pattern employs prepositive dependents:
It is a very easy app.
The "very" is a prepositive modifier of "easy", and the phrase "very easy" is prepositive to the "app" that it modifies.
Another common pattern has postpositive dependents for a ...
13
Reorder.
With re- words, you should use ‘re-’ (with a hyphen) if the next word
begins with an ‘e’ or a ‘u’ (when not pronounced like ‘you’).
Otherwise, don’t hyphenate. It’s therefore re-examine, re-urge,
re-entry and re-elect, and reuse, reunion, reorder, reinforce and
redevelop.
Source: http://www.proofreadinglondon.com/blog/to-hyphenate-or-not-...
13
Short answer: neither. The word you want is nonexistent.
Longer answer: You can actually add a "non" prefix to any word to make up something new, even if it's not in the dictionary. (If you do so, common style says to use a hyphen.)
After having eaten an endless supply of apples, she was pleased to finally be handed a "non-apple".
You ...
12
To answer the question directly: yes, it is perfectly correct to write “a 5-mm-thick layer”. However, when not in prefix position, it would be “a layer that’s 5 mm thick”, this time without any hyphens.
The accepted answer appears to be wrong in its assertion that there is something wrong with writing “a five-millimeter-thick layer”. There isn’t.
Here ...
12
If you look closely at the ODO (Oxford Dictionary Online), they claim that dogleg is American English, while dog-leg is British English. They could have made this clearer, but if you're maintaining an on-line dictionary, it's hard to get everything right.
If you look at Google Ngrams, this is more or less true, although both versions of English use both ...
11
The rule-of-thumb I've found in researching this issue, (though no reference to a specific style guide was referenced – one site linked here) is if Latin and other foreign phrases are not hyphenated in their original language, then they are not hyphenated in English.
11
"Opt out" without the hyphen would be taken as a verb--that is, to opt out or remove oneself from something.
I've opted out of attending the conference.
"Opt-out" with the hyphen may be used as a compound adjective:
Be sure to make a decision before the opt-out period
Where "opt-out" here describes the period.
11
To identify a “no later than” date for the use in English publishing of hyphens in compound modifiers that appear immediately before nouns, I ran Google Books searches for the words booke and boke for the period 1500–1800, and then, for each match, ran an internal search for instances of well, a constraint that I instituted in order to yield search results ...
10
Using the hyphen would traditionally be appropriate there, though it strikes me as old-fashioned. The BBC's website, for example, regularly uses "postmen and women" without a hyphen. Of course, this is somewhat ambiguous, as it could be taken to mean the same as "thousands of women and postmen". Context usually shows what is meant, but the hyphen certainly ...
10
In most U.S. English style guides, the decision about whether to double- or single-hyphenate a phrase such as "spherical Gaussian based approximations" rests on whether the first word in the string attaches primarily to the noun or primarily to the modifier closer to the noun. In other words, if you are talking about Gaussian-based approximations that are ...
10
A general remark on hyphens from Longman English Grammar by Aleander
1 There are no precise rules.
2 When short nouns are joined together, they form one word without a hyphen
(a teacup). But this may lead to problems of recognition, therefore bus stop, not busstop.
3 Hyphens are often used for verb + particle combinations as in make-up.
4 When a ...
10
To avoid ambiguity.
He turned twenty one too many times.
Is not the same as
He turned twenty-one too many times.
9
I originally closevoted with a comment saying the general trend is to move from two separate words, through the hyphenated form to a single-word form. But actually it's a bit more complex than that. Compare this NGram for what I would call a "compound noun" usage at nighttime...
...with the more obviously "compound adjective" usage a nighttime [some ...
9
According to a reddit.com post, this usage “originates as a navy term for flag signalling”:
A tackline is a length of halyard approximately 6 feet long; the exact length depends upon the size of flags in use. The tackline is transmitted and spoken as tack and is written as a dash (hyphen) "-". It is used to avoid ambiguity. It separates signals or groups ...
answered Aug 17 '14 at 15:38
James Waldby - jwpat7
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