Hyphen- HyWHEN? Educational Resources K12 Learning, Grammar, English / Language Arts Lesson Plans, Activities, Experiments, Homeschool Help

Lesson Plan - Get It!

Audio:

Take a look at this hyphen joke.

hyphen joke

Just from looking at the picture, what do you think hyphens do?
What is this illustration trying to tell us about hyphens?

Write your ideas down in your notebook or on paper.

Then, keep reading to see if you were right!

A hyphen, which looks like a short line, is an all-important punctuation mark used for certain grammar reasons.

Did you see that short dash in all-important?

That's the hyphen we are talking about!

Knowing what a hyphen is and how and when to use it is important because it will help you better understand when reading. It will also make your writing easier to understand.

Let's get into the nitty-gritty of hyphen usage!

There are a few specific details on when to use a hyphen; however, its basic purpose is what made the opening joke so funny.

A hyphen breaks apart words while bringing them together.

	When to Use a Hyphen	Examples
	to join two (or more) words acting as one adjective BEFORE a noun	one-way street chocolate-covered peanuts well-known author
	compound numbers or fractions	forty-six sixty-three five and one-half feet
	with the prefixes ex-, self-, and all- between a prefix and a capitalized word	ex-husband self-assured all-inclusive mid-September
	with the suffix -elect	self-elect President-elect
	with figures or letters	T-shirt Pre-Civil War mid-1980s
	to divide words at the end of a line (if necessary) If this happens, you should only break the word and place the hyphen where the syllable break is or where a hyphen would already go.	pref- erence sell- ing mass- produced self- conscious
	two words brought together as a compound These words CAN have a hyphen but may also just be combined into one word. You may also add a hyphen to a word you make up for humor, vivid writing, or to avoid confusion.	hair-stylist or hairstylist The slacker video-gamed his way through life. Springfield has little-town charm.
	the ages of people and things	two-year-old child four-year project
	to show distance between time and numbers	from 4-6 PM 200-300 people
	double last names	Ms. Heinz-Eakins John Smith-Doe

If you would like to explore more examples or see rarer instances of hyphen usage, check out Hyphens.

Ready to learn something that few people realize?

A hyphen is NOT the same thing as a dash!

A dash looks like a hyphen but is a little longer. We won't get into dashes right now, but they are used in place of other punctuation — such as commas, parentheses, semicolons, colons, and ellipses — to add emphasis.