Words & WritingGreek → English
Hyphen
/ˈhaɪfən/noun
The short stroke joining two words or splitting one across a line break.
The Greek roots
ὑπό
hypó
under
ἕν
hén
one
Literally: “under one”
The story of the word
Greek scribes wrote hyphen, meaning together as one, as a small curve beneath two letters to show they belonged to a single word. When printing arrived the mark climbed onto the line and turned into a stroke between words instead. It has never really been punctuation: a hyphen is an instruction about how to read what surrounds it.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1620s
Same family
hypothesishypodermichenotheism
In a sentence
A missing hyphen turned the recipe into twenty odd eggs.
House style drops the hyphen once a compound is familiar enough.