500 hyphenated words
- words with hyphens in them
- words with dashes in them
- words with two hyphens in them
- words with hyphens in it
20 examples of hyphenated compound words!
Should that word have a hyphen?
Among the correspondence we receive at Merriam-Webster, a significant amount of it comes from people asking how to style a particular compound word.
Should it be two words?
Hyphenated words with roll in them
One word? Should a hyphen be inserted between the two components?
The definitive answer is: it's complicated.
Open, Hyphenated, and Closed Compounds
For much of the dictionary’s history, a compound word was shown in only one form—closed, hyphenated, or open—even if there were examples of two or, sometimes, all three forms in use.
This practice was necessitated by the limitations of page space: it simply wasn’t practical to show all of the possible permutations of a compound word at the expense of other information in a print dictionary entry.
1000 hyphenated wordsYou saw only one styling—the one that occurred most frequently within a sample of evidence. If that evidence changed, then the headword was revised.
Even in the digital age, this is true for many entries. The term tongue twister, for example, is shown as an open (two-word) compound, even though there is plenty of evidence for
- words with hyphens - between them
- common words with hyphens