A hyphen has two main uses…but is often used for the wrong reason—as a dash. We’ll cover how to properly use Dashes later. For now, we’re going to go over the two reasons to use a hyphen: connect words into a larger chunk or show where a word is broken across a line.
Multiple Modifiers
Modifiers are used to tell what kind a thing is, and sometimes it takes more than one word. What kind of candy? Rock hard. So it’s ‘rock-hard candy’. What kind of boy? A quick witted one, so we have ‘a quick-witted boy’. What kind of hotel? A dog friendly one, so it’s a ‘dog-friendly hotel’. What kind of singer? One that is well known, so we have a ‘well-known singer’.
Without hyphens, sometimes a modifier is unclear. Let’s say that you got a new job, and in the work schedule, it says that you are going to work “twenty four hour shifts”. Does that mean you have a bunch of short shifts or one long one? There is a big difference between “twenty four-hour shifts” and “twenty-four hour shifts”. The first are a bunch of short works periods—the second a long time to be at work.
Compound Words
There are some words that we always keep together, for example: Mother-in-law, Master-at-arms, Editor-in-chief. And there are some words that used to be hyphenated but aren’t anymore. Did you know that ‘online’ originated as two words? From the mid-1800s until the mid-1960s, it was ‘on line’ with a space. Then the hyphenated form took over until 1980, when the single-word version became popular, and that’s how we use it today. (If you haven’t had a chance to play with the Ngram Viewer on Google Books, it’s really interesting.)
Broken Words
Allowing your words to be hyphenated will help keep your lines of text fairly even. That way if a word is close to the end of the line, it can be broken onto the next line. It is especially important if you have narrow columns (such as in a newspaper).
The option to turn on hyphenation is on the Page Layout Tab, in the Page Setup Group.
To see how your document will look with hyphenation, just turn it on to automatic. If you don’t like the way it looks, you can just undo it (ctrl-Z) and do it manually. Opening the Hyphenation Options dialogue box will allow you to tweak the settings until you get it just the way you want.
Using a half-visible Optional Hyphen in certain words allows you to use the hyphenation process with more control. Those words will only break where you want them broken…if they need to be.