Punctuation: Use of Hyphen
Hyphen (-)
A hyphen is a punctuation mark with three main uses. Many people confuse this punctuation mark with the dash, but the two are quite different. The hyphen can be used in compound words, to link words to prefixes, and also as a way to show word breaks.
The hyphen rules and examples:
(1) Use a hyphen to join two or more words together into a compound term. Do not separate the words with spaces.
Examples:
- My eight-year-old boy loves reading.
- I work part-time.
- Self-expression
- Self-confidence
- Self-consciousness
- Nineteenth-century history
- Old-furniture salesman
- Off-the-peg suits
- Self-paced learning exercises
(2) To link prefixes to words.
For example: These things happened before the pre-enlightenment era.
(3) To indicate word breaks
For example: Unlike what some people might think, the twentieth-century was very different from other preceding time periods.
