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Concept
Hyphen
Summary
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. Son-in-law is an example of a hyphenated word.
The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes (en dash and em dash and others), which are longer, or with the minus sign , which is also longer and usually higher up to match the crossbar in the plus sign .
As an orthographic concept, the hyphen is a single entity. In character encoding it is represented by any of several characters and glyphs, including the Unicode hyphen (shown at the top of the infobox on this page), the hyphen-minus, the soft hyphen, and the nonbreaking hyphen. The character most often used to represent a hyphen (and the one produced by the key on a keyboard) is called the "hyphen-minus" by Unicode, deriving from the original ASCII standard, where it was called "hyphen (minus)".
The word is derived from Ancient Greek ὑφ' ἕν (huph' hén), contracted from ὑπό ἕν (hypó hén), "in one" (literally "under one"). An (ἡ) ὑφέν ((he) hyphén) was an undertie-like sign written below two adjacent letters to indicate that they belong to the same word when it was necessary to avoid ambiguity, before word spacing was practiced.
The first known documentation of the hyphen is in the grammatical works of Dionysius Thrax. At the time hyphenation was joining two words that would otherwise be read separately by a low tie mark between the two words. In Greek these marks were known as enotikon, officially romanized as a hyphen.
With the introduction of letter spacing in the Middle Ages, the hyphen, still written beneath the text, reversed its meaning. Scribes used the mark to connect two words that had been incorrectly separated by a space. This era also saw the introduction of the marginal hyphen, for words broken across lines.
The modern format of the hyphen originated with Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, 1455 with the publication of his 42-line Bible. His tools did not allow for a sublinear hyphen, and he thus moved it to the middle of the line.
Official source
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