What are the rules in English language to split words at the end of a line?
Where exactly must the hyphen split the word?
Learn English – What are the rules for splitting words at the end of a line
hyphenation
Related Solutions
Hyphen and dash are at least three distinct characters, and the hyphen is the shortest.
- Hyphens “-” are primarily used in compound words (a 20-year-old co-ed) and when a word is broken at the end of a line (which explains why word breaking is called hyphenation). Hyphens are always very short, narrower than most letters. There is never a space between the hyphen and a word fragment that it joins (though there may be a space on one side in constructs like “pre- and post-conference activities”).
- En-dashes “–” are mostly used to express a range (1932–1945). They are sometimes used as super-hyphens (a Los Angeles–New York flight). In these uses, there is no space before or after. They are so named because they are as wide as a lowercase “n” in most fonts.
- Em-dashes “—” are sentence punctuation — often parenthetical — as shown in this sentence. They are at least as wide as an ”m”, occasionally even wider. There is no consensus as to whether to surround them by spaces.
- Another similar character is the minus sign. It is typically about one en wide and thicker than a hyphen or dash, but this is dictated by the choice of mathematical font which can be chosen separately from the main text font.
- There are many more somewhat similar characters and other uses of these characters; Wikipedia has a list as well as a lot of minutiae on these characters and their uses.
I would call them hyphenated compounds, as opposed to solid compounds and open compounds. Note how they are not dashed. That's because a hyphen (-) is not the same as a dash (–, —, ⁓, ‒).
Short compounds may be written in three different ways, which do not correspond to different pronunciations, however:
- The "solid" or "closed" forms in which two usually moderately short words appear together as one. Solid compounds most likely consist of short (monosyllabic) units that often have been established in the language for a long time. Examples are housewife, lawsuit, wallpaper, etc.
- The hyphenated form in which two or more words are connected by a hyphen. Compounds that contain affixes, such as house-build(er) and single-mind(ed)(ness), as well as adjective-adjective compounds and verb-verb compounds, such as blue-green and freeze-dried, are often hyphenated. Compounds that contain articles, prepositions or conjunctions, such as rent-a-cop, mother-of-pearl and salt-and-pepper, are also often hyphenated.
- The open or spaced form consisting of newer combinations of usually longer words, such as distance learning, player piano, lawn tennis, etc.
Best Answer
The easiest thing to do, and the only way of being sure you agree with the authorities, is to look words up in the dictionary. Some of the hyphenations currently in American dictionaries make no sense at all. For example, the reason that prai-rie and fair-y are hyphenated the way they are seems to be that 150 years ago, the editors of Webster's dictionary thought they didn't rhyme1; prairie was pronounced pray-ree with a long 'a', while fairy was pronounced fair-ee with an r-colored 'a'.
That said, there are a few hyphenation rules that will let you hyphenate 90% of English words properly (and your hyphenations of the remaining 10% will be perfectly reasonable, even if they disagree with the authorities'). Here they are, in roughly decreasing order of priority:
Finally, if the above rules leave more than one acceptable break between syllables, use the Maximal Onset Principle:
There are lots of exceptions to these rules:
Sometimes the rules conflict with each other. For example, ra-tio-nal gets hyphenated after a short vowel in an accented syllable because ti acts as a digraph indicating that the 't' should be pronounced 'sh'.
Sometimes it's not clear what constitutes a morpheme boundary: why ger-mi-nate and not germ-i-nate?
Sometimes the pronunciation of a word varies—/væpɪd/ or /veɪpɪd/? Merriam-Webster and American Heritage dictionaries agree that both pronunciations are valid, but they disagree about the hyphenation.
And some hyphenations I can't figure out the reason for: the Maximum Onset Principle would suggest pa-stry, but the authorities all agree on pas-try.
1I believe some American dialects still make this distinction in pronunciation; the editors of Webster's dictionary weren't imagining things.