Hyphens vs. dashes | Punctuation | Khan Academy

Hello Garans, hello Paige, hi David. So today we're going to learn about hyphens and what a hyphen is. It's a little stick like this, as opposed to a dash which is about twice as long. People confuse them a lot, uh, but they have very different functions.

So what a hyphen is used to do is it's used to join two words into one. Alright? So for example, we have the word yellow that's a word with meaning. We have the word green, that's a word with meaning, and we may have a word that does fit right in between those two or two at once, uh, like chartreuse or whatever. Okay, you know? But not everybody wants to use the word chartreuse. No, it's kind of crazy, kind of a wacky word.

Um, so instead of doing that you might just want to say yellow-green and connect yellow and green with a hyphen. So yeah, a hyphen is joining these two things. Um, but let's say we had a sentence like her hair was yellow-green with her eyes, you know? And so we're still separating the words yellow and green with a stick. Um, but a dash is longer and instead of uniting yellow-green, it's separating them the way that you know a semicolon might.

Yeah, it's not one thing; it's she has yellow hair and green eyes. If she had yellow-green hair, that would be a different story. Yes, so what's neat about hyphens and what's kind of confusing about hyphens is that whether or not we use a hyphen indicates how common a compound phrase is.

Um, so Brian Garner in Garner's Modern American Usage and in the Chicago Manual of Style draws this distinction with compound words. And I should first say what a compound word is. Right? A compound word is, uh, two words smack together somehow, right?

Um, so if we take the... So once upon a time at the dawn of the internet, Paige, okay? When dinosaurs walked the earth, um, and I was just a wee little baby. Yes. Um, you would refer to getting online. Okay, right?

Uh, and then as it became more and more prominent, more and more popular, this is what's called an open compound. Um, then it became online, separated with a hyphen. This is what's called a hyphenated compound. Makes sense? And now when we think about it, it's just an adjective and it's online. And this is a closed compound, right?

Okay, okay. It became closed 'cause everyone knows what that means, right? Um, so you would use hyphenated compounds when you're kind of in this intermediary stage of accepted. Mhm. So like maybe one day in the future, yellow-green will be super common color, right? It's everyone's favorite color, so it'll just be smooshed together with no hyphen. Today is not that day. Today is not that day, so there's a hyphen there, right?

Uh, I think it's also important to hyphenate for clarity. Mhm. Let me explain what I mean by that. Yeah, so first of all, when I say hyphenate, that's just a word that means to put a hyphen in something. Yes, to hyphenate.

So if a compound word could be misconstrued or misunderstood, you should throw in a hyphen or check a dictionary or a style guide. So, okay, so Paige, yes, I would like to raise some chickens. Good idea!

So in order to raise some chickens, I need a chicken coop, right? That is, yeah, true. And a coop, right? C-O-O-P is a place where chickens live; it's like a little enclosure.

Yeah, but let's say I want to buy this coop from a community-run business, right? It's called the Cooperative business, or a co-op. Mhm. Well, now sometimes it appears like that. Like that, like C-O-O-P. But if I said something like I want to buy my coop from the co-op like that, it'll end up looking like this: I want to buy my coop from the coupe, right? Or my co-op from the co-op, or co-op from the coupe or something.

So in order to be clear, it really helps to put in that little hyphen, and that's the difference, right? So you're using this to say, oh, you know, this is actually short for Cooperative, you know, because it's operated by a bunch of people working together as opposed to this word which is just C-O-O-P, right?

So you want to hyphenate for clarity when you can. Makes sense? So let's bring all this together, right? So I made a yellow-green coop with the co-op. Okay, you all work together to make a yellow-green coop. That's pretty cool.

So we're connecting, uh, yellow and green with a hyphen; we're connecting co-op with a hyphen to differentiate it from this word coop. And that's basically what you use hyphens for. Mhm. You can learn anything. David out, Paige out.