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One Word, Two Words, or Hyphenated?

In the English language, it seems nothing causes more confusion than the one-word, two-words, or hyphenated conundrum. If a longtime water-skier water-skis long-term on water skis, which he does, how can we ever hope to know why those compounds are written the way they are?

Your first stop for these matters is always the dictionary. If your term is in there either as one word or hyphenated, your best bet is to just do the same. Longtime, for example, is in most dictionaries as one word—a closed compound. Water-skier, however, has a dictionary entry with a hyphen.

If you look up water ski, however, you see something interesting. The noun, the piece of sports equipment, is in there as a two-word compound with no hyphen. But under that same entry, you might see that the verb form is hyphenated. So you water-ski on water skis.

Many terms listed in the dictionary have different forms—closed compounds, open compounds, or hyphenated compounds—depending entirely on the part of speech. You make up a story about makeup, for example. You pick up your new pickup truck. The adjective good-looking is in the dictionary, too. That’s all you need to know about those terms. But here’s where it gets tricky: even though good-looking is in the dictionary, bad-looking is not.

So what do you do?

For terms not in the dictionary, you turn to the rules of hyphenation, prefixes, and suffixes. Here are the steps to follow in those cases.

First, note whether your compound is made of whole words only or whether you’re using a prefix or a suffix.

To combine whole words, you need to first decide whether you’re making an adjective, a noun, or a verb. The rules for hyphenating compound adjectives are easy: hyphenate any two words used as an adjective (or even an adverb) if it makes the term clearer. But there’s an exception for -ly adverbs. Don’t hyphenate those.

So if you want to talk about a monster crustacean, a woman-eating lobster uses a hyphen to make clear you don’t mean a single person eating shellfish. That’s what we mean by making the term clearer: any time you need to show that multiple words are working together to modify another, that’s when the hyphen is your friend.

If the compound you want to create is for use as a noun or verb, that’s a little trickier because hyphenation rules don’t really address those situations. Most talk only about modifiers. But because the hyphen’s job is to prevent confusion, you can use it as needed. The boxer’s head-punch knocked out his opponent.

Prefixes and suffixes have no set rules, either. If you want a precise system, you have to consult a style guide like the Chicago Manual of Style or the Associated Press Stylebook. Both of those lay out specific rules for many specific cases. But not all of them. Also, the two styles contradict each other.

Here’s a simplified system: all prefixes and suffixes should be attached without a hyphen unless the result looks awkward. So, nonprofit but non-Apple product; prefabricated but pre-1950.