While reading the 'Guide to the use of the dictionary' of the Compact Oxford English Dictionary (yes, I read dictionary introductions, shame on me), I stumbled upon a section about hyphenation with regards to noun compounds, specifically upon the following sentence:
[…] hyphens are also used to show a word's grammatical function. […] so that you would write for example I used my credit card but credit-card debt.
What is not clear to me is the sentence 'hyphens are used to show a word's grammatical function'. If I understand the concept of 'grammatical function' correctly, then this sentences doesn't make much sense to me, because then one would have to add hyphens to every grammatical object, because every grammatical object has a function in a sentence.
Am I correct in saying that I can take this sentence to mean something like 'hyphens are also used when the grammatical function of noun compounds is to be an adjective of the following noun'? Or is there maybe some sense of the term 'grammatical function' that I am missing?
Best Answer
Sort of. What they mean is something to the effect of "noun+noun compounds are hyphenated when they themselves form part of a "((noun+noun)+noun)" compound. I guess they may extend this to other types of compounds-- you'd need to read the full article to see. (In "credit(-)card debt"-- it doesn't matter whether you hyphenate it or not-- "credit card" is still essentially a noun, but that's not particularly crucial to our point here.)
Now, that all sounds very logical. But there's just one problem: in actual practice, the rule that they suggest isn't actually followed necessarily. Instead, it's very common to simply write "credit card debt".