Russ in New Jersey had a question about hyphens: In “northwestern California landmark” should “northwestern California” be hyphenated? “I’m not sure if it’s simply a matter of preference or if the ...

Hyphenaters used to be fearless. Bad to the bone. Unflinching in the face of multi-word adjectives that required two or even three hyphens. An editor would see the terms “anti” and “social” and “media ...

Hyphens are only used to combine certain words together. They are not strong enough to set off phrases or words from a sentence. Use hyphens in the following situations: Use in compound numbers and ...

Compound words are made up of two parts of speech. For example, the compound noun handkerchief is made up of two nouns: hand + kerchief. Semantically, compound words are very interesting, since their ...