9 ms·

How to use (or not use) a hyphen

70 points by samizdis 5y ago

phdelightful 5y ago
> In justified text, it divides into appropriate syllables a word that lands on a line break, a task that machines have not yet mastered Maybe I’m misunderstanding but Latex does this pretty well (“mastered” is a bit fuzzy I guess).
- zamadatix 5y ago
  The hyphenation dictionaries browsers use for CSS hyphenation seem to be pretty accurate as well. At least for English.
  - jfk13 5y ago
    All those I'm aware of are directly based on those used in the TeX world, so that's to be expected. What browsers are less good at, though, is determining exactly which lines to hyphenate when the possibility exists. If the 'hyphens: auto' property is used, they tend to be too eager, whereas (La)TeX applies hyphenation much more judiciously.
  - kqr 5y ago
    It goes way beyond dictionaries though. Once you know where you can break words, how do you know where you should break words? A simple flood fill will hyphenate very enthusiastically, use suboptimal breaking points, does not consider stretching whitespace, and leads to rivers and other artifacts. Many more sophisticated algorithms suffer from the same problems. Last I used LaTeX seriously, it also produced rivers where a human using e.g. Scribus would not.
- zestyping 5y ago
  I wonder if they're referring to cases where the hyphenation opportunities differ for words with different meaning but identical spelling. In some cases, the meaning (and hence the accenting, and hence the hyphenation) can only be derived from context, as with "present", which can be hyphenated "pre-sent" or "pres-ent".
- MikeDelta 5y ago
  I think that is thanks to the Knuth-Plass algorithm, with Knuth being the inventor of Tex, which powers Latex. The problem seems not trivial indeed. http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/230668/any-progress-on-knuth-plass-algorithm https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/230668/any-progress-... http://litherum.blogspot.com/2015/07/knuth-plass-line-breaking-algorithm.html http://litherum.blogspot.com/2015/07/knuth-plass-line-breaki...
assbuttbuttass 5y ago
The New Yorker also makes some other... unconventional typographic decisions such as using a diaeresis in words like coöperate or reëxamined https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-the-diaeresis https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  Right. Good for them for having a unique style, but I don't know why anyone else would decide to format their text like this. Same thing with the recent "black"/"Black" decision by NYTimes.
  - lou1306 5y ago
    Just playing devil's advocate here, but cooperate and cooper have different pronunciations, and coöperate (or co-operate) makes it absolutely clear.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      It’s the best kind of correct - technically correct. Co-worker vs cow orker, etc.
    - googlryas 5y ago
      I can't imagine that to be the case, because this is English...there are numerous common words that are spelled exactly the same, but pronounced differently (read, wind, wound off the top of my head). The fact that they don't give them any special treatment(diatrics or something else) makes me think the legibility is not the concern. Also, I might be wrong, but I don't think people read most words by scanning letter by letter and forming a belief as to what the word says. I personally have never misread cooperate as cooper, as far as I can recall.
      - zestyping 5y ago
        I think it's more a question of what's easier on the reader, rather than what a reader can feasibly distinguish. Yes, words like "read", "present", "lead" have multiple prononunciations, but they have a cost; if half the words you encountered were like that, English would be very hard to read. I find "co-operate" slightly easier to read than "cooperate", at the expense of being slightly longer. These are all minor trade-offs (or is it tradeoffs?) of course; it's not a cut-and-dry (but hopefully not cutanddry) argument as to what to do in any individual case.
atoav 5y ago
There is this silly thing with typographic rules — I just don't care about them too much. They are different in any language and other than languages themselves they are rather arbitrary conventions. Use whatever typographic rules you like, as long as it communicates the ideas you like to tell...?!
- MerelyMortal 5y ago
  > ?! I would like to introduce the interrobang: ‽
  - nescioquid 5y ago
    You can have a little more nuance (as in chess annotations) with two characters: ?!: questionable or unsound move, but possibly strong !?: seems to be a strong move, but possibly unsound BTW, I thought these were all called interrobangs. Not so?
- testbjjl 5y ago
  > Use whatever typographic rules you like, as long as it communicates the ideas you like to tell...?! How you communicate is sometimes more important than what you communicate. How you communicate can detract from what you communicate. How you communicate allows the reader better grasp what you communicate.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    The media is the massage.
- brimble 5y ago
  > Use whatever typographic rules you like, as long as it communicates the ideas you like to tell...?! Following conventions & rules is exactly how you communicate those ideas. Failing to do so tends to cause confusion and distraction. It's not about what's right and what's wrong—it's about compassion for one's readers.
- kergonath 5y ago
jonpalmisc 5y ago
If this stuff (typography, punctuation, etc.) interests you, definitely check out Butterick’s Practical Typography [1]. Great resource and easy to follow. [1] https://practicaltypography.com/ https://practicaltypography.com/
- jerry1979 5y ago
  I can practically feel that cut off capital A in my arms and chest.
- unmole 5y ago
  But please don't do things like this: > Cross-references, denoted with small caps, are clickable. > Links to outside material are denoted with a red circle, like so. Hyperlinks are almost universally distinguished by underlining them. There is no rational reason to invent a new design language and expect people to learn it. And for what benefit? The seemingly random capitalisation of words and weird circles in the middle of the text makes it much more jarring than simple underlining.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    The sum and the whole of the law shall be do whatever everyone else does unless you have a damn good reason, imo.
  - flyingfences 5y ago
    The site also has a page on Underlining [0], in which the author explains his perspective on underlining as an unsightly relic of mechanical typewriters, which had no other ways -- italicizing, bolding, different fonts, small-caps -- of emphasizing text. His is a style guide for professional publishing, in which appearances matter. [0] https://practicaltypography.com/underlining.html https://practicaltypography.com/underlining.html
    - unmole 5y ago
      > His is a style guide for professional publishing, in which appearances matter. All the more reason not to have jarring capitalisation and weird circles.
staindk 5y ago
Alternate link - https://web.archive.org/web/20220429155234/https://www.newyorker.com/culture/comma-queen/how-to-use-or-not-use-a-hyphen https://web.archive.org/web/20220429155234/https://www.newyo...
zestyping 5y ago
I'm still a curmudgeon when it comes to "e-mail". It's electronic mail — just like e-book, e-signature, e-reader, e-ticket, e-file, e-learning, e-commerce, e-check, and so on. The lowercase "e-" prefix is broadly used and has a particular meaning. The hyphen makes it read better, just like A-bomb, I-beam, O-ring, S-curve, U-turn, V-neck, or X-ray. Without the hyphen it looks like the stress should lean on the second syllable ("em-AIL"); "email" looks as awkward to read as "abomb", "ibeam", or "oring". I know the ship has long since sailed on "e-mail". But to put it simply, it feels better to me.
- flowerbreeze 5y ago
  I always write e-mail too. Perhaps because in my native language the word "email" means "enamel" and it feels like it would be a strange thing to send somebody.
  - zestyping 5y ago
    Exactly, I think of enamel as well.
  - InCityDreams 5y ago
    So what are your words for 'mail', and 'electronic'? Shouldn't then 'e/mail', be literally translated to be the correct thing to send to somebody (in your language)?
    - rdlw 5y ago
      Welcome to speaking about technology in a language other than English! I know that in Icelandic, the Icelandic Language Council is proactive about coming up with equivalents for new words, but even there English words tend to sneak in if they're not fast enough or if their alternatives aren't well liked. In Polish, you have mejl for email, and spam for spam. The problem is, people who are on the cutting edge of technology just tend to use the most popular name for it, in this case the English name. So by the time that anyone is thinking about what it should be called in their language, the English term already has some momentum and it can be hard to change. Of course, language always evolves—it's not like anyone's worried that English borrowed too many words from French. But it's a little strange to speak a language during such a great influx of foreign words. E: I don't know what language GP speaks, but Polish Wikipedia says (unsourced, so, y'know) that listel and el-poczta were proposed for Polish ('list' means letter and 'poczta' means mail), but they were ultimately unsuccessful.
denton-scratch 5y ago
> precious few are devoted to a single mark. "Eats Shoots and Leaves" is surely the canonical apostrophe rant.
- ramshorns 5y ago
  I thought it was about a comma? But the book discusses all kinds of punctuation.
- SeanLuke 5y ago
  Eats Shoots and Leaves is riddled with punctuation errors. What it is is a canonical example of why the British, who long ago abandoned consistent punctuation, should not write books lecturing others about punctuation. I think the best takedown of this hilariously bad screed is here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/06/28/bad-comma https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/06/28/bad-comma
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    I don't treat it as a lecture; I treat it as a pretty funny rant. I agree that it's snobby; but I still enjoy her poke at "Carrot's £1" - the "grocer's apostrophe". It's a book of satirical humour, you're not supposed to take it too seriously. Oh, the inconsistency of English is by design. Was it Doctor Higgins in My Fair Lady who claimed to be able to locate the origin of any English accent? The perverse grammar of English (and I suppose any other language) is a xenophobic shibboleth[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
mauvehaus 5y ago
I'm a little surprised that anyone would write this article without mentioning the en-dash and em-dash. They are frequently confused with hyphens but serve a rich and sometimes overlapping variety of purposes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#En_dash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#En_dash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Em_dash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Em_dash (Edited to fix the spelling of em-dash. Doh!)
- ramshorns 5y ago
  My favourite example of this is using an en dash for a relationship between two separate things, rather than the more closely-connected compound adjective of a hyphen. Italian–American relations: foreign relations between the governments of Italy and the United States. Italian-American relations: relatives who have moved from Italy to the United States.
  - caymanjim 5y ago
    I'm surprised at how much of an impact your use of the en dash here has on how I read the sentence. I found myself pausing longer between words in my inner dialogue as I read "Italian–American".
    - clmay 5y ago
      Prosody is wonderful, innit?
      - caymanjim 5y ago
        Thanks for making me look-up a word.
- dn3500 5y ago
  They don't mention it because the dash is dead. Check any major news web site, even the New York Times, and you'll find they often use the repulsive double hyphen in place of dash.
Melatonic 5y ago
I usually get distracted when reading material like this but this time I found it really -
stewx 5y ago
There is so much you can get for free these days. I see it on packages everywhere: -Gluten free -Sugar free -Fat free -Dairy free
jonathankoren 5y ago
Hyphenated prefixes are dumb. There’s literally no reason for it. People already know how to pronounce cooperate. However, if you’re feeling fancy, they proper punctuation is a diaeresis.

70 points by samizdis 5y ago

> In justified text, it divides into appropriate syllables a word that lands on a line break, a task that machines have not yet mastered Maybe I’m misunderstanding but Latex does this pretty well (“mastered” is a bit fuzzy I guess).

zamadatix 5y ago
The hyphenation dictionaries browsers use for CSS hyphenation seem to be pretty accurate as well. At least for English.
- jfk13 5y ago
  All those I'm aware of are directly based on those used in the TeX world, so that's to be expected. What browsers are less good at, though, is determining exactly which lines to hyphenate when the possibility exists. If the 'hyphens: auto' property is used, they tend to be too eager, whereas (La)TeX applies hyphenation much more judiciously.
- kqr 5y ago
  It goes way beyond dictionaries though. Once you know where you can break words, how do you know where you should break words? A simple flood fill will hyphenate very enthusiastically, use suboptimal breaking points, does not consider stretching whitespace, and leads to rivers and other artifacts. Many more sophisticated algorithms suffer from the same problems. Last I used LaTeX seriously, it also produced rivers where a human using e.g. Scribus would not.
zestyping 5y ago
I wonder if they're referring to cases where the hyphenation opportunities differ for words with different meaning but identical spelling. In some cases, the meaning (and hence the accenting, and hence the hyphenation) can only be derived from context, as with "present", which can be hyphenated "pre-sent" or "pres-ent".
MikeDelta 5y ago
I think that is thanks to the Knuth-Plass algorithm, with Knuth being the inventor of Tex, which powers Latex. The problem seems not trivial indeed. http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf http://www.eprg.org/G53DOC/pdfs/knuth-plass-breaking.pdf https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/230668/any-progress-on-knuth-plass-algorithm https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/230668/any-progress-... http://litherum.blogspot.com/2015/07/knuth-plass-line-breaking-algorithm.html http://litherum.blogspot.com/2015/07/knuth-plass-line-breaki...

assbuttbuttass 5y ago

The New Yorker also makes some other... unconventional typographic decisions such as using a diaeresis in words like coöperate or reëxamined https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-the-diaeresis https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...

oh_sigh 5y ago
Right. Good for them for having a unique style, but I don't know why anyone else would decide to format their text like this. Same thing with the recent "black"/"Black" decision by NYTimes.
- lou1306 5y ago
  Just playing devil's advocate here, but cooperate and cooper have different pronunciations, and coöperate (or co-operate) makes it absolutely clear.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    It’s the best kind of correct - technically correct. Co-worker vs cow orker, etc.
  - googlryas 5y ago
    I can't imagine that to be the case, because this is English...there are numerous common words that are spelled exactly the same, but pronounced differently (read, wind, wound off the top of my head). The fact that they don't give them any special treatment(diatrics or something else) makes me think the legibility is not the concern. Also, I might be wrong, but I don't think people read most words by scanning letter by letter and forming a belief as to what the word says. I personally have never misread cooperate as cooper, as far as I can recall.
    - zestyping 5y ago
      I think it's more a question of what's easier on the reader, rather than what a reader can feasibly distinguish. Yes, words like "read", "present", "lead" have multiple prononunciations, but they have a cost; if half the words you encountered were like that, English would be very hard to read. I find "co-operate" slightly easier to read than "cooperate", at the expense of being slightly longer. These are all minor trade-offs (or is it tradeoffs?) of course; it's not a cut-and-dry (but hopefully not cutanddry) argument as to what to do in any individual case.

atoav 5y ago

There is this silly thing with typographic rules — I just don't care about them too much. They are different in any language and other than languages themselves they are rather arbitrary conventions. Use whatever typographic rules you like, as long as it communicates the ideas you like to tell...?!

MerelyMortal 5y ago
> ?! I would like to introduce the interrobang: ‽
- nescioquid 5y ago
  You can have a little more nuance (as in chess annotations) with two characters: ?!: questionable or unsound move, but possibly strong !?: seems to be a strong move, but possibly unsound BTW, I thought these were all called interrobangs. Not so?
testbjjl 5y ago
> Use whatever typographic rules you like, as long as it communicates the ideas you like to tell...?! How you communicate is sometimes more important than what you communicate. How you communicate can detract from what you communicate. How you communicate allows the reader better grasp what you communicate.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  The media is the massage.
brimble 5y ago
> Use whatever typographic rules you like, as long as it communicates the ideas you like to tell...?! Following conventions & rules is exactly how you communicate those ideas. Failing to do so tends to cause confusion and distraction. It's not about what's right and what's wrong—it's about compassion for one's readers.
kergonath 5y ago

jonpalmisc 5y ago

If this stuff (typography, punctuation, etc.) interests you, definitely check out Butterick’s Practical Typography [1]. Great resource and easy to follow. [1] https://practicaltypography.com/ https://practicaltypography.com/

jerry1979 5y ago
I can practically feel that cut off capital A in my arms and chest.
unmole 5y ago
But please don't do things like this: > Cross-references, denoted with small caps, are clickable. > Links to outside material are denoted with a red circle, like so. Hyperlinks are almost universally distinguished by underlining them. There is no rational reason to invent a new design language and expect people to learn it. And for what benefit? The seemingly random capitalisation of words and weird circles in the middle of the text makes it much more jarring than simple underlining.
- bombcar 5y ago
  The sum and the whole of the law shall be do whatever everyone else does unless you have a damn good reason, imo.
- flyingfences 5y ago
  The site also has a page on Underlining [0], in which the author explains his perspective on underlining as an unsightly relic of mechanical typewriters, which had no other ways -- italicizing, bolding, different fonts, small-caps -- of emphasizing text. His is a style guide for professional publishing, in which appearances matter. [0] https://practicaltypography.com/underlining.html https://practicaltypography.com/underlining.html
  - unmole 5y ago
    > His is a style guide for professional publishing, in which appearances matter. All the more reason not to have jarring capitalisation and weird circles.

staindk 5y ago

Alternate link - https://web.archive.org/web/20220429155234/https://www.newyorker.com/culture/comma-queen/how-to-use-or-not-use-a-hyphen https://web.archive.org/web/20220429155234/https://www.newyo...

zestyping 5y ago

I'm still a curmudgeon when it comes to "e-mail". It's electronic mail — just like e-book, e-signature, e-reader, e-ticket, e-file, e-learning, e-commerce, e-check, and so on. The lowercase "e-" prefix is broadly used and has a particular meaning. The hyphen makes it read better, just like A-bomb, I-beam, O-ring, S-curve, U-turn, V-neck, or X-ray. Without the hyphen it looks like the stress should lean on the second syllable ("em-AIL"); "email" looks as awkward to read as "abomb", "ibeam", or "oring". I know the ship has long since sailed on "e-mail". But to put it simply, it feels better to me.

flowerbreeze 5y ago
I always write e-mail too. Perhaps because in my native language the word "email" means "enamel" and it feels like it would be a strange thing to send somebody.
- zestyping 5y ago
  Exactly, I think of enamel as well.
- InCityDreams 5y ago
  So what are your words for 'mail', and 'electronic'? Shouldn't then 'e/mail', be literally translated to be the correct thing to send to somebody (in your language)?
  - rdlw 5y ago
    Welcome to speaking about technology in a language other than English! I know that in Icelandic, the Icelandic Language Council is proactive about coming up with equivalents for new words, but even there English words tend to sneak in if they're not fast enough or if their alternatives aren't well liked. In Polish, you have mejl for email, and spam for spam. The problem is, people who are on the cutting edge of technology just tend to use the most popular name for it, in this case the English name. So by the time that anyone is thinking about what it should be called in their language, the English term already has some momentum and it can be hard to change. Of course, language always evolves—it's not like anyone's worried that English borrowed too many words from French. But it's a little strange to speak a language during such a great influx of foreign words. E: I don't know what language GP speaks, but Polish Wikipedia says (unsourced, so, y'know) that listel and el-poczta were proposed for Polish ('list' means letter and 'poczta' means mail), but they were ultimately unsuccessful.

denton-scratch 5y ago

> precious few are devoted to a single mark. "Eats Shoots and Leaves" is surely the canonical apostrophe rant.

ramshorns 5y ago
I thought it was about a comma? But the book discusses all kinds of punctuation.
SeanLuke 5y ago
Eats Shoots and Leaves is riddled with punctuation errors. What it is is a canonical example of why the British, who long ago abandoned consistent punctuation, should not write books lecturing others about punctuation. I think the best takedown of this hilariously bad screed is here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/06/28/bad-comma https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/06/28/bad-comma
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  I don't treat it as a lecture; I treat it as a pretty funny rant. I agree that it's snobby; but I still enjoy her poke at "Carrot's £1" - the "grocer's apostrophe". It's a book of satirical humour, you're not supposed to take it too seriously. Oh, the inconsistency of English is by design. Was it Doctor Higgins in My Fair Lady who claimed to be able to locate the origin of any English accent? The perverse grammar of English (and I suppose any other language) is a xenophobic shibboleth[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth

mauvehaus 5y ago

I'm a little surprised that anyone would write this article without mentioning the en-dash and em-dash. They are frequently confused with hyphens but serve a rich and sometimes overlapping variety of purposes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#En_dash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#En_dash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Em_dash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Em_dash (Edited to fix the spelling of em-dash. Doh!)

ramshorns 5y ago
My favourite example of this is using an en dash for a relationship between two separate things, rather than the more closely-connected compound adjective of a hyphen. Italian–American relations: foreign relations between the governments of Italy and the United States. Italian-American relations: relatives who have moved from Italy to the United States.
- caymanjim 5y ago
  I'm surprised at how much of an impact your use of the en dash here has on how I read the sentence. I found myself pausing longer between words in my inner dialogue as I read "Italian–American".
  - clmay 5y ago
    Prosody is wonderful, innit?
    - caymanjim 5y ago
      Thanks for making me look-up a word.
dn3500 5y ago
They don't mention it because the dash is dead. Check any major news web site, even the New York Times, and you'll find they often use the repulsive double hyphen in place of dash.

Melatonic 5y ago

I usually get distracted when reading material like this but this time I found it really -

stewx 5y ago

There is so much you can get for free these days. I see it on packages everywhere: -Gluten free -Sugar free -Fat free -Dairy free

jonathankoren 5y ago

Hyphenated prefixes are dumb. There’s literally no reason for it. People already know how to pronounce cooperate. However, if you’re feeling fancy, they proper punctuation is a diaeresis.