The central sign above is a good example of why we need to use hyphens. It doesn’t read easy. What is an “Ins”, you wonder.
“Walk” is quite often used as a verb. It can also be a noun. In this sign it is part of a compound noun… made up by combining “walk” with the preposition “in” – walk-ins, or people without appointments who can walk in off the street for what would be a skin-changing decision. The hyphen would signal to the reader that “walk” is not on its own – it has to go with the following word.
A hyphen helps remove confusion
A man eating lion is different from a man-eating lion; a nude-show director may not be the same as the nude show director
And is it “10 year-old children” – or should it be “10-year-old children”?
Well, the first could mean the writer is talking about 10 children who are all a year old.
The second reference is to an unknown number of children who are all 10 years old. If there are 15 of these youngsters you could say there are 15 10-year-olds.
A hyphen can help remove ambiguity
“I resent the parcel,” wrote the postman in a note to you, making you wonder what he’s got against the package. What he meant to say was that he had re-sent the parcel.
Another ambiguous statement is: “My coop helps me sell my eggs.” It would better to use “co-op”
“Resent” refers to a feeling of bitterness or anger; “re-sent” means “sent again”;
a “coop” is a hen house; “co-op” is a joint business endeavour usually one owned by its workers.
Breaking a word with a hyphen
Of course we all know how hyphens break a word into two at the end of a line in a paragraph. With computers thinking they know better than humans where a word should be broken, we can get some silly examples:
… elimin-
ate
or
… grin-
ding
If I have to split the two words, I would write them as
elimi-
nate
So we need to watch out and manually correct them.
A good rule to follow is to break a word on a syllable.
Whatstheword 