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Compounds, words composed of two or more words, are sometimes spelled with a hyphen, as in mass-produced and go-between. Sometimes they take a space and sometimes they don’t. And if that wasn’t complicated enough, sometimes, their spellings change over time. The only way to get it right is to look it up in the dictionary. But when that yields nothing, what do you do?
Recently faced with the problem of how to spell a two-word compound, I never imagined how deep down the rabbit hole I would dive to find an answer. I have traveled through Wonderland and find myself on the other side with an entirely different point of view to the one I started out with.
But here I am, and this post describes my journey through the odds-and-ends of how compounds morph and change, and the pros and cons of how you might spell them.
Open, closed, or hyphenated?
The hyphen has several uses. Just like many other punctuation marks, its primary purpose is to prevent confusion. It’s designed to help you, the reader, interpret a piece of text just as I, the writer, intended. It’s my job to make sure that you don’t have to work too hard.
Open, commonplace compounds such as living room and real estate take a space. Go-between uses a hyphen, and closed compounds, such as football and crosswalk, are bound together.
Over time, some compounds evolve. Shifting from open, through hyphenated, to a closed compound as they become familiar. Such as cab driver, cab-driver, and today we write cabdriver (en-us), but for en-gb, we still use cab driver. Well taxi driver might be more accurate. I grew up with en-gb in school, but today I primarily write in US English – the lack of consensus is my favorite alibi for my perceived or actual confusion.
Evolution of compounds and effect on tone-of-voice
Teenager was once written as two separate words. Sometime during the 1940s, it took on a hyphen, and its first appearance as a closed compound was in the late 1960s. Today, The New Yorker still hyphenates teen-ager. The New York Times, however, moved over to teenager just before the turn of the 21st century. Merriam-Webster lists teenager without a hyphen, but as a writer, I am free to apply my own rules. The problem comes when you’re trying to create rules for a bunch of people, to make it easy for everyone to be consistent. Magazines and newspapers employ subeditors to ensure that copy, no matter who writes it, is consistent. Organizations rely on people adhering to their style guides — with moderate success.
The day The New Yorker changes its style guide to reflect modern usage will undoubtedly be met with uproar from loyal subscribers like myself. I am likely to go into denial, anger, and eventually accept the change – I might die first. For me, the humble hyphen in teen-ager sets a tone that reflects a desire to belong to a bygone era. A feeling that will be lost when the hyphen is no longer.
The evolution of technology and its impact on spelling
Digital-first publishing and widespread access to content by international audiences have heightened the need for simplicity in written communication. The result has been a shift toward minimal punctuation. Familiarity and minimalism have led to on-line becoming online, and email is now preferred over e-mail – even if Merriam Webster still (April 2020) lists e-mail as its first preference.
Some open compounds, such as ice cream, living room, dinner table, and coffee mug, however, haven’t evolved over time. These open compounds seem to describe commonplace items. Whereas closed compounds, such as eggplant, earmark, and honeymoon, are less common and also reflect changes in use over time. Earmark, for example, stems from the way farmers would make a nick in the ear of an animal to define ownership.
There’s a funny moment in Four Weddings and a Funeral where Charles (Hugh Grant) offers Carrie (Andie McDowell) a suggestion for the etymology of the word honeymoon:
“I don’t know. I suppose it’s ‘honey’ cos it’s sweet as honey
and ‘moon’ because it was the first time a husband got to see his wife’s bottom.”
So, it seems logical to adopt an open compound for commonplace broad-reaching ideas such as social distancing, a hyphen if you want to emphasize a connection that may not be obvious, such as head-banging. And a closed compound if the concept is familiar.
Use a hyphen when a compound describes something
Consider the sentence:
The butler’s head movement patterns.
Without a helping hyphen, you might stumble and think the butler’s head is the subject of the sentence. And so, some copywriters would apply the rule of hyphenating compounds when they are used as adjectives. To give: the butler’s head-movement patterns. Some subeditors (you know who you are) might argue that the hyphen isn’t needed because there is no room for confusion.
Hyphens in Google search
Just as Google search is case insensitive, it is also hyphen insensitive, so searches for head movement and head-movement should reveal the same results. However, according to Google, such terms are sometimes treated as reciprocal synonyms, sometimes not. See this Twitter post. Unfortunately, search results are inconsistent, and there are more reasons for this than the presence or absence of the hyphen.
Google is continually evolving its algorithms to provide more individual – more relevant – results. Browser activity (what you’ve clicked on in the past) and location have a significant impact on search results.
Sound copywriting should never be sacrificed to cater to Google’s current search methodologies because they can and will change.
Most web-publishing tools provide features to overcome this problem so that Google rates your content, irrespective of whether people search for head movement or head-movement.
A breathing space
There is, however, a compelling argument for adopting an open compound when a hyphen might have been the obvious choice, at least for those of us who went to school in the 1970s. Because it creates breathing space. It avoids the clutter of hyphens when they are not strictly needed. It can make a statement.
Strategies for consistency
Imagine I’ve created an innovative technology for monitoring head movements. I can choose to spell my tech as an open compound, with a hyphen or closed. I’ve decided not to go with the closed version, headmovement, because it’s hard to read.
I now have three choices:
Strategy no.1 — hyphens everywhere
Adopt head-movement for the noun and head-movement when used as an adjective.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
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Strategy no.2 — the copywriter’s choice
Adopt head movement for the noun and head-movement when used as an adjective.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
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Strategy no.3 — bunk the hyphen
Adopt head movement for the noun and the adjective.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
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The other side of Wonderland
Before I wrote this post, I was a firm advocate of the copywriter’s choice. Sometimes, I have even adopted the hyphens everywhere approach because I believed it helped to avoid confusion. Having taken a trip down the rabbit hole and woken up on the other side of Wonderland, I’ve decided to step out of my comfort zone and bunk the hyphen when the compound is the protagonist of the story. Why? Because, writing this post has made me realize that the rules apply to compounds that appear once or twice in a text. But when a core subject is frequently repeated, readers will grasp the idea soon enough. Irrespective of whether the concept is new or familiar, after a few repetitions, people will read the open compound as intended, as a single concept.
dpdoyle 
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