hyphen

The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes (en dash , em dash and others), which are wider, or with the minus sign , which is also wider and usually drawn a little higher to match the crossbar in the plus sign . As an orthographic concept, the hyphen is a single entity. In character encoding for use with computers, it is represented in Unicode by any of several characters. These include the dual-use hyphen-minus, the soft hyphen, the nonbreaking hyphen, and an unambiguous form known familiarly as the "Unicode hyphen", shown at the top of the infobox on this page. The character most often used to represent a hyphen (and the one produced by the key on a keyboard) is called the "hyphen-minus" in the Unicode specification because it is also used as a minus sign. The name derives from its name in the original ASCII standard, where it was called "hyphen (minus)".

The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes (en dash , em dash and others), which are wider, or with the minus sign , which is also wider and usually drawn a little higher to match the crossbar in the plus sign . As an orthographic concept, the hyphen is a single entity. In character encoding for use with computers, it is represented in Unicode by any of several characters. These include the dual-use hyphen-minus, the soft hyphen, the nonbreaking hyphen, and an unambiguous form known familiarly as the "Unicode hyphen", shown at the top of the infobox on this page. The character most often used to represent a hyphen (and the one produced by the key on a keyboard) is called the "hyphen-minus" in the Unicode specification because it is also used as a minus sign. The name derives from its name in the original ASCII standard, where it was called "hyphen (minus)". == History == from the University of Texas copy. The page has 40 lines. The first known documentation of the hyphen is in the grammatical works of Dionysius Thrax. At the time, hyphenation was joining two pieces of text that might otherwise be read as two separate words by a low tie mark. This was necessary due to the ambiguity inherent in the lack of word spacing. In Greek these marks were known as enotikon, officially romanized as a hyphen. With the introduction of word spacing in the Middle Ages, the hyphen, still written beneath the text, was used to connect two words that had been incorrectly separated by a space. With word spacing in play, a space is essentially the same function as an enotikon, rendering the enotikon unnecessary. This, plus the extra difficulty of using an enotikon in the closely-spaced lines of movable type, caused the greek-style hyphen to fall by the wayside. The Middle Ages also saw the introduction of the , for words broken across lines, and also the compound-word hyphen, for forming hyphenated compounds. It is unclear, and a matter of scholarly debate, whether the compound-word hyphen came from the marginal hyphen or vice versa. Johannes Gutenberg, in the publication of his famous 42-line Gutenberg Bible, heralding the age of movable type, used , "common to blackletter texts of the time", as the form of his hyphen. The Gutenberg Bible is noted for its perfect justification and regular spacing, which it achieves in part by hyphenating words without any additional rules that would constrain it from placing a hyphen anywhere in a word. == Use in computing == === Nonbreaking hyphens === The word segmentation rules of most text systems consider a hyphen to be a word boundary and a valid point at which to break a line when flowing text. This is not always desirable; it could lead to ambiguity (e.g. retreat and re‑treat would be indistinguishable with a line break after re), it can split off an ending as in "n th" (though n th or "nth" could be used), and it is inappropriate in some languages other than English (e.g., a line break at the hyphen in Irish or Romanian would be undesirable). The non-breaking hyphen, nonbreaking hyphen, or no-break hyphen looks identical to the regular hyphen but word processors do not break words at it. The nonbreaking space exists for similar reasons. ==="Unicode hyphen" === Because the conventional hyphen-minus mark on keyboards is ambiguous (it can be interpreted sometimes unexpectedly as a hyphen or a minus, depending on context), the Unicode consortium allocated codepoints for an unambiguous minus and an unambiguous hyphen. The Unicode hyphen ( ) is seldom used. Even the Unicode Standard uses U+002D instead of U+2010 in its text.

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