hyphens
When do we add a hyphen (-) to a complex adjective word?
Here are a few examples:
This is an Xbox-compatible game.
This is a Creation-Kit-compatible 3d asset.
This is a SkyRe-compatible Skyrim mod.
More often than not all these examples are used without a hyphen or hyphens. Is this a case of people making a grammatical mistake or are both forms completely correct and it's just a matter of preference?
It is not an adjective in those expressions, and is not normally hyphenated. Your source is wrong in describing it as an adjective.
It is a quantifier, which is grammatically quite different from an adjective.
On the other hand, suppose a casino has chips of different denominations, one of which is 100. Then one might speak about "a one-hundred chip": in this phrase, it would be adjectival, and so hyphenated. This is quite different from "one hundred chips".
This is a little used car.
This is how I would usually write my sentence for a small car that is used.
This is a little, used car.
Same as above, with emphasis on its size.
This is a used, little car.
While only native speakers would "feel" this, this definitely feels wrong. This post supports this - condition comes after size in adjective order. (See the bullets in the top answer)
This is a little-used car.
This is how I would express a barely used car. I have seen and used this word myself. Note that there is a difference in pronunciation between "little-used" and "little used" - the pause between the words is more pronounced for the latter.
This is a little used-car.
I would never construct this sentence, and I have never seen it. It is very uncommon.
With that said, the data shows that I was right a hundred years ago, but currently, nothing I said really holds water. See attached Google Ngram, which shows all three of my points are wrong:
Best Answer
This is not a question of grammar, but of style. Writers use hyphens with compound adjectives to avoid ambiguity so that the reader does not have to read and re-read a sentence to garner the meaning from it.
Consider:
Someone might try to parse this sentence at first to mean he was a white man who had a beard.
This makes it quite clear that John was a man with a white beard, not a white man with a beard.