A hyphen ( - ) is a punctuation mark. Guillemets ( or after French) also called Angle quotes, are line segments pointed as if arrows ( « or ») sometimes forming a complementary The question mark (? also known as an interrogation point, question point, query, or eroteme, is a punctuation mark that replaces Quotation marks or inverted commas (informally referred to as quotes and speech marks) are Punctuation marks used in pairs to set off speech A semicolon (   ) is a conventional Punctuation mark with several usages The slash ( /) is a punctuation mark It is also called a virgule, diagonal, stroke, forward slash, oblique dash, The solidus ( ⁄) is a punctuation mark that is not found on standard keyboards Interword separation is the act and the effect of mutually separating the written representations of Words The early Semitic languages mdashwhich had no vowel In writing a space () is a blank area that is devoid of content which separates words letters numbers and punctuation An interpunct ( ·) is a small dot used for Interword separation in ancient Latin script, being perhaps the first consistent visual representation of word boundaries Typography is the art and techniques of arranging type, Type design, and modifying type Glyphs Type glyphs are created and modified using a variety An ampersand ( &) also commonly called an " 'and' sign," is a Logogram representing the conjunction "and" The typographic character @, the at sign, denotes a pan-lingual abbreviation of the word 'at' An asterisk ( *) (Latin asteriscum "little star" from Greek ἀστερίσκος) is a Typographical symbol or Glyph The backslash ( \) is a typographical mark ( Glyph) used chiefly in Computing. In Typography, a bullet is a typographical symbol or Glyph used to introduce Items in a list, like below also known as the point of a bullet Caret is the name for the symbol ^ in ASCII and some other Character sets Its Unicode code point is U+005E and its ASCII code in hexadecimal is 5E The currency sign ( ¤) is a character used to denote a currency when the symbol for a particular currency is unavailable In many national currencies, the cent is a monetary unit that equals 1/100 of the basic monetary unit The euro sign (€ is the Currency sign used for the Euro, the official currency of the European Union (EU See also Pound (currency.The pound sign (" £ " or " ₤ " is the symbol for the Pound sterling —the currency of the ¥￥ ₪The sheqel sign ( ₪) A dagger ( †, &dagger U+ 2020 is a typographical symbol or Glyph. The degree symbol (° Unicode: U+00B0 HTML: &deg is a typographical symbol or Glyph, that is used to represent degrees of arc (see The inverted question and exclamation marks are used to begin interrogative and exclamatory sentences respectively in written Spanish. The inverted question and exclamation marks are used to begin interrogative and exclamatory sentences respectively in written Spanish. In Logic and Mathematics, negation or not is an operation on Logical values for example the logical value of a Proposition Number sign is a name for the symbol #; it is the preferred Unicode name for the Code point associated with that Glyph. The Numero sign (U+2116 or Number sign is used in many languages to indicate ordinal numeration especially in names and titles for example instead of writing the long " The percent sign ( %) is the symbol used to indicate a Percentage (that the preceding number is divided by one hundred The pilcrow (¶ Unicode U+00B6 HTML entity &para also called the Paragraph sign or the alinea ( The prime symbol ( ′  double prime symbol ( &Prime  triple prime symbol ( ‴  etc The section sign (§ Unicode U+00A7 HTML entity &sect is a typographical character used mainly to refer to a particular section The tilde (~ (/ˈtɪldə/ is a Grapheme with several uses The name of the character comes from Spanish, from the Latin titulus Diaeresis or trema See also Diaeresis History Historically the diaeresis mark or trema is far older than the umlaut mark The underscore _ (also called understrike, underbar, low line, or low dash is a character that originally appeared on the Typewriter. Note "broken bar" and the glyph "¦" redirect here Typography is the art and techniques of arranging type, Type design, and modifying type Glyphs Type glyphs are created and modified using a variety For other uses of this term please refer to Asterism disambiguation page The symbol ☞ is a Punctuation mark called an index or fist. In a Mathematical proof, the therefore sign (∴ is a symbol that is sometimes placed before a Logical consequence, such as the conclusion of a The interrobang ( ‽, is a nonstandard English -language Punctuation mark intended to combine the functions of the Question mark (also "؟" redirects here For the Arabic question mark see Question mark. This page lists Japanese typographic symbols which are not included in Kana or Kanji. A sarcasm mark or sarcasm point identifies text as being Derogatory or ironic. It is used both to join words and to separate syllables. A word is a unit of Language that carries meaning and consists of one or more Morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together and has a Phonetic A syllable ( Greek:) is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds It is often confused with the dashes ( –, —, ― ), which are longer and have different functions, and with the minus sign ( − ) which is also longer. A dash is a Punctuation mark It is longer than a Hyphen and is used differently The plus and minus signs ( + and &minus) are Mathematical symbols used to represent the notions of positive and negative as well as the operations The use of hyphens is called hyphenation.

Customs of usage in English

For Wikipedia's own standards for hyphen usage, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Hyphens

Hyphens are most commonly used to break single words into parts, or to join ordinarily separate words into single words.

A definitive collection of hyphenation rules does not exist. Therefore, the writer or editor should consult a manual of style or dictionary of his or her preference, preferably for the country in which he or she is writing. A style guide or style manual is a set of standards for design and writing of documents either for general use or for a specific publication or organization A dictionary is a book of alphabetically listed Words in a specific language with definitions etymologies pronunciations and other information or a book of alphabetically The rules of style that apply to dashes and hyphens have evolved to support ease of reading in complex constructions; editors often accept deviations from them that will support, rather than hinder, ease of reading. Spaces should not be placed between a hyphen and either of the words it connects except when using a suspended hyphen (e. g. nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers—see below).

The use of the hyphen in compound nouns and verbs has, in general, been steadily declining. Compounds that might once have been hyphenated are increasingly left with spaces or are combined into one word. The sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary removed the hyphens from 16,000 entries, such as fig-leaf (now fig leaf), pot-belly (now pot belly) and pigeon-hole (now pigeonhole). ^[1] In other countries hyphens are dropped in favor of connecting the two-word compounds. Use of the hyphen is particularly avoided by those concerned with visual cleanliness, for example writers of advertising copy, packaging labels etc. Advertising is a form of Communication that typically attempts to persuade potential Customers to Purchase or to consume more of a particular Brand

However, a significant number of compounds are still routinely hyphenated (e. g. breast-feed, add-on (noun), get-together, Hewlett-Packard, merry-go-round). Hyphenation remains the norm in certain compound modifier constructions and, amongst some authors, with certain prefixes (see below). Hyphenation is also routinely used to avoid unsightly spacing in justified texts (for example, in newspaper columns).

Separating

Justification and line-wrapping

To allow more efficient usage of paper, more regular appearance of right-side margins without requiring spacing adjustments, and to eliminate the need to erase hand-written long words begun near the end of a line that do not fit, words may be divided at the nearest breakpoint between syllables and a hyphen inserted to indicate that the letters form a word fragment, not a word. For example:

The details of doing this properly are complex and language-dependent and can interact with other orthographic and typesetting practices: see justification and hyphenation algorithm. The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific Writing system to write the language Typesetting involves the presentation of textual material in graphic form on Paper or some other medium. In Typesetting, justification (can also be referred to as 'full justification' is the Typographic alignment setting of text or Images within A hyphenation algorithm is a set of rules (especially one codified for implemention in a computer program that decides at which points a word can be broken over two lines with a Hyphen Such hyphenation algorithms, when employed in concert with dictionaries, are sufficient for all but the most formal texts. A hyphenation algorithm is a set of rules (especially one codified for implemention in a computer program that decides at which points a word can be broken over two lines with a Hyphen

Prefixes and suffixes

In general, prefixes and suffixes are affixed to another word. Certain prefixes (co-, pre-, mid-, de-, non-, anti-, etc. ) are often improperly hyphenated, though usage varies between American and British English. Phonology North American English regional phonology In many ways compared to English English, North American English is conservative in its Phonology. British English or UK English ( BrE, BE, en-GB) is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the British English tends towards hyphenation (pre-school) whereas American English tends towards omission of the hyphen (preschool). A hyphen is mandatory when a prefix is applied to a proper (capitalized) adjective (un-American, de-Stalinisation).

In British English, hyphens may be employed where readers would otherwise be tempted into a mispronunciation (e. g. co-worker is so punctuated partly to prevent the reader's eye being caught automatically by the word cow). The AP Stylebook provides further information on the use of "co-" as a prefix.

Hyphens may be used, in association with prefixes, suffixes or otherwise, when repeated vowels or consonants are pronounced separately rather than being silent or merged in a diphthong. In Phonetics, a diphthong (also gliding vowel) (from Greek grc δίφθογγος "diphthongos" literally "with two sounds" or "with For example: shell-like, anti-intellectual. In the vowel-vowel case, some English authorities use a diaeresis (as in coöperation, rather than co-operation or cooperation), but this style is now rare. In Linguistics, diaeresis, or dieresis, is the pronunciation of two adjacent Vowels in two separate Syllables rather than as a Diphthong

Some prefixed words are hyphenated to distinguish them from other words that would otherwise be homographs, such as recreation (fun or sport) and re‑creation (the act of creating again), or predate (what a predator does) and pre‑date (to be of an earlier calendar date). A homograph is one of a group of words that share the same spelling but have different meanings Recreation or fun is the expenditure of time in a manner designed for therapeutic refreshment of one's Body or Mind. A re-creation is a Reenactment, typically used to solve a Crime or determine a Mode of failure or Cause of death. A date in a calendar is a reference to a particular day represented within a Calendar system

Syllabification and spelling

Hyphens are occasionally used to denote syllabification, as in syl-lab-i-fi-ca-tion. Syllabification is the separation of a word into Syllables whether spoken or written Most American dictionaries use an interpunct, sometimes called a "middle dot" or "hyphenation point", for this purpose, as in syl·lab·i·fi·ca·tion. An interpunct ( ·) is a small dot used for Interword separation in ancient Latin script, being perhaps the first consistent visual representation of word boundaries Similarly, hyphens may be used to imply the spelling of a word, such as "W-O-R-D spells word".

Joining

Compound modifiers

Compound modifiers are groups of two or more words that jointly modify the meaning of another word. A compound modifier (also called a compound adjective or a phrasal adjective) is an adjectival or adverbial phrase of two or more words When a compound modifier, other than a noun–noun or adverb–adjective combination, appears before a term, the compound modifier is generally hyphenated to prevent any possible misunderstanding, such as in American-football player or real-world example. In Grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a Noun or Pronoun, giving more information about the Without the hyphen, there is potential confusion about whether American applies to football or player, or whether the author might perhaps be referring to a "world example" that is "real". Compound modifiers can extend to three or more words, as in ice-cream-flavored candy, and can be adverbial as well as adjectival (spine-tinglingly frightening).

When the same combination of words follows the term it applies to, hyphens may or may not be required, depending on how "tightly bound" the compound is felt to be. Noun–adjective compounds are likely to require a hyphen. For example: American-football player / a player of American football and real-world example / an example from the real world, but time-sensitive documents / the documents are time-sensitive and left-handed catch / he took the catch left-handed.

Hyphens are not normally used in noun–noun compound modifiers, when no confusion is possible; for example: government standards organization and department store manager.

Hyphens should not normally be used in adverb–adjective modifiers such as wholly owned subsidiary and quickly moving vehicle (because the adverbs clearly modify the adjectives; "quickly" does not apply to "vehicle" as "quickly vehicle" would be meaningless). However, if the adverb can also function as an adjective, then a hyphen may be required for clarity. For example, the phrase more-important reasons ("reasons that are more important") is distinguished from more important reasons ("additional important reasons"), where more is an adjective. A mass-noun example is the following: more-beautiful scenery as distinct from more beautiful scenery. In Linguistics, a mass noun (also uncountable noun or non-count noun) is a common Noun that presents entities as an unbounded mass Other examples are well-received speech and hard-won fight.

Hyphens are used to connect numbers and words in forming adjectival phrases (particularly with weights and measures), whether numerals or written out, as in 28-year-old woman (cf. twenty-eight-year-old woman) or 320-foot wingspan. The SI recommends against this practice when using abbreviated metric units. The same usually holds for abbreviated time units. Hyphens are also used in spelled-out fractions as adjectives (but not as nouns), such as two-thirds majority and one-eighth portion.

Where an adjective–noun compound would be plural standing alone, it usually becomes singular and hyphenated when modifying another noun. For example, four days becomes four-day week.

An en dash ( – ) sometimes replaces the hyphen in hyphenated compounds if either of its constituent parts is already hyphenated or contains a space (e. A dash is a Punctuation mark It is longer than a Hyphen and is used differently g. high-priority–high-pressure tasks (tasks which are both high-priority and high-pressure). Many people use hyphens where en dashes are more properly used, in ranges (pp. 312–14), relationships (blood–brain barrier) and to convey the sense of to (Boston–Washington race). Washington ( is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States.

Other compounds

Connecting hyphens are used in a large number of miscellaneous compounds, other than modifiers, such as in lily-of-the-valley, cock-a-hoop, clever-clever, tittle-tattle and orang-utan. Usage is often dictated by convention rather than fixed rules, and hyphenation styles may vary between authors; for example, orang-utan is also written as orangutan or orang utan, and lily-of-the-valley may or may not be hyphenated.

Two-word names of numbers less than one hundred are hyphenated. For instance, the number 23 should be written twenty-three, and 123 should be written one hundred and twenty-three. (The and is omitted in American English. )

Some married couples compose a new surname (sometimes referred to as a double-barrelled name) for their new family by combining their two surnames with a hyphen. A surname is a name added to a Given name and is part of a Personal name. In English-speaking and some other Western countries a double-barrelled name is a Family name with two parts which may or may not be joined with a hyphen for example Jane Doe and John Smith might become Jane and John Smith-Doe, or Doe-Smith, for instance. The Name " John Doe " is used as a Placeholder name for a male party in a legal action case or discussion whose true identity is either unknown or John Smith is a name often regarded as the archetype of a common Personal name in most English -speaking countries a generic name sometimes representing " In some countries, however, only the woman hyphenates her birth surname, appending her husband's surname.

Suspended hyphens

A suspended hyphen (also referred to as a "hanging hyphen" or "dangling hyphen") may be used when a single base word is used with separate, consecutive, hyphenated words which are connected by "and", "or", or "to". For example, nineteenth-century and twentieth-century may be written as nineteenth- and twentieth-century. This usage is derived from that of German, which uses a dangling hyphen when the second word is unhyphenated, e. The German language (de ''Deutsch'') is a West Germanic language and one of the world's major languages. g. , Die Lumpen- und Arbeiterproletariaten.

Other uses

A hyphen may be used to connect groups of numbers, such as in dates (see below), telephone numbers or sports scores.

The hyphen is sometimes used to hide letters in words, as in G-d. In Judaism, the name of God is more than a distinguishing title

Examples of usage

Some strong examples of semantic changes caused by the placement of hyphens:

• disease-causing poor nutrition, meaning poor nutrition that causes disease
• disease causing poor nutrition, meaning a disease that causes poor nutrition

• a man-eating shark is a shark that eats humans
• a man eating shark is a man who is eating shark meat

• a blue green sea is a contradiction
• a blue-green sea is a sea whose colour is somewhere between blue and green

Additional examples of proper use:

• text-only document or the document is text-only
• Detroit-based organization or the organization is Detroit-based
• state-of-the-art product or the product is state-of-the-art (but The state of the art is very advanced. with no hyphen)
• board-certified strategy or the strategy is board-certified
• thought-provoking argument or the argument is thought-provoking
• time-sensitive error or the error is time-sensitive
• case-sensitive password or the password is case-sensitive
• government-issued photo ID or the photo ID is government-issued (but …is issued by the government with no hyphen. )
• light-gathering surface or the surface is light-gathering
• award-winning novel or the novel is award-winning (but, more likely, …won an award with no hyphen)
• web-based encyclopedia or the encyclopedia is web-based
• fun-loving person or the person is fun-loving
• how to wire-transfer funds
• how to tax-plan
• advertising-supported service or service is advertising-supported (but, better, …is supported by advertising with no hyphen. )
• Rudolph Giuliani is an Italian-American (but see hyphenated American)
• list of China-related topics …list of topics is China-related (but …related to China with no hyphen)
• out-of-body experience
• near-death experience
• in surnames, for example Dominique Strauss-Kahn

Note, though, that many authoritative sources, such as the Chicago Manual of Style, recommend writing commonplace compounds open (i. KBE Per, "Postnominal letters should be included when they are issued by a country or organization the subject has been closely associated with Epithet The term hyphenated American is an Epithet common 1890-1920 used to disparage Americans who were of foreign birth or origin and who displayed an allegiance For the list of topics related to Republic of China, see List of Taiwan-related topics The list of People's Republic of China An out-of-body experience ( OBE or sometimes OOBE) is an experience that typically involves a sensation of floating outside of one's body and in some cases perceiving Dominique Strauss-Kahn, often referred to as DSK, (born 25 April 1949 in Neuilly-sur-Seine) is a French Economist, Lawyer, and The Chicago Manual of Style (abbreviated in writing as CMS or CMOS or verbally as Chicago) is a Style guide for American English e. , without hyphen) when they appear after the noun they modify and when they are used adverbially. Thus

• She always wears out-of-date clothes.

but

• Her wardrobe is out of date.

Similarly, for the adverbial use compare

• The hand-to-hand combat was frightful.

and

• They fought hand to hand in repulsing the attack.

Origin and history of the hyphen

The likely first use of the hyphen—and its origination—ought to be credited to Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany circa 1455 with the publication of his 42-line Bible. Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg ( 1398 &ndash February 3, 1468) was a German Goldsmith and printer who is credited Gutenberg Bible (also known as the 42-line Bible or the Mazarin Bible) is a printed version of the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible that Examination of an original copy on vellum (Hubay index #35) in the U. S. Library of Congress shows that Gutenberg's movable type was set justified in a uniform style, 42 equal lines per page. Vellum (from the Old French Vélin for "calfskin" is mammal skin prepared for writing or printing on single pages scrolls codices or books The Library of Congress is the De facto National library of the United States and the research arm of the United States Congress

Prior to Gutenberg setting the first lines printed in the Western world with movable type, there was no need for hyphens or the justification of lines to equal length. The Gutenberg printing press required words made up of individual letters of type to be held in place by a surrounding non-printing rigid frame. Gutenberg solved the problem of making each line the same length to fit the frame by inserting a hyphen as the last element at the right side margin. This interrupted the letters in the last word, requiring the remaining letters be carried over to the start of the line below. His hyphen appears throughout the Bible as a short, double line inclined to the right at a 60-degree angle.

In medieval times and the early days of printing, the predecessor of the comma was a slash. The slash ( /) is a punctuation mark It is also called a virgule, diagonal, stroke, forward slash, oblique dash, As the hyphen ought not to be confused with this, a double-slash was used, this resembling an equals sign tilted like a slash. History The "=" symbol that is now universally accepted by mathematics for equality was first recorded by Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde in The Writing forms changed with time, and included the full development of the comma, so the hyphen could become one horizontal stroke.

However, publishers of dictionaries liked that a tilted symbol would give them a little extra room in their books. Those dictionaries based on the second edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary used one small, slightly tilted slash for a hyphen which they added at the end of a line where they broke the word, but used a double-slash, much like the very old symbol, to indicate a hyphen that was actually a part of the phrase but just happened to fall at the end of the line. Merriam-Webster, which was originally the G & C Merriam Company of Springfield Massachusetts, is an American company that publishes reference books This double-slash would be used in hyphenated phrases in the middle of the text as well, so that there would be no confusion.

Hyphens in computing

In the ASCII character encoding, the hyphen was encoded as character 45. American Standard Code for Information Interchange ( ASCII) A character encoding consists of a code that pairs a sequence of characters from a given character set (sometimes incorrectly referred to as Code page Technically, this character is called the hyphen-minus, as it is also used as the minus sign and for dashes. The hyphen-minus is the character at position 2D HEX in ASCII and standards that derive from it A dash is a Punctuation mark It is longer than a Hyphen and is used differently In Unicode, this same character is encoded as U+002D ( - ) so that Unicode remains compatible with ASCII. In Computing, Unicode is an Industry standard allowing Computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's In Computing, Unicode is an Industry standard allowing Computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's However, Unicode also encodes the hyphen and minus separately, as U+2010 ( ‐ ) and U+2212 ( − ), respectively, along with a series of dashes. Use of the hyphen-minus character is discouraged where possible, in favour of the specific hyphen character. Nevertheless, since the Unicode hyphen is awkward to enter on normal keyboards, the hyphen-minus character remains extremely common. Hyphens are often used instead of dashes in situations where proper dash characters are unavailable (such as ASCII-only text) or difficult to enter, or when the writer is unaware of the difference. Some writers use two hyphens (--) to represent a dash in ASCII text.

When flowing text, it is sometimes preferable to break a word in half so that it continues on another line rather than moving the entire word to the next line. Since it is difficult for a computer program to automatically make good decisions on when to hyphenate a word the concept of a soft hyphen was introduced to allow manual specification of a place where a hyphenated break was allowed without forcing a line break in an inconvenient place if the text was later reflowed. In contrast, a hyphen that is always displayed and printed is called a hard hyphen (though some use this term to refer to a non-breaking hyphen; see below). Soft hyphens are most useful when the width is known but future editability is desired, as few would have the patience to put them in at every place they believed a hyphenated split was acceptable (as would be needed for their meaningful use on a medium like the Web, however CSS3 introduces language-specific hyphenation dictionaries which solves this).

When flowing text, a system may consider the soft hyphen to be a point at which a word may be broken, and display a hyphen at the end of the broken line; if the line is not broken at that point the hyphen is not displayed. In most parts of ISO-8859 the soft hyphen is at position 0xAD, and since the first 256 positions in Unicode are taken from ISO-8859-1, it has a Unicode codepoint of U+00AD. ISO/IEC 8859 is a joint ISO and IEC standard for 8-bit Character encodings for use by computers In Mathematics and Computer science, hexadecimal (also base -, hexa, or hex) is a Numeral system with a ISO 8859-1, more formally cited as ISO/IEC 8859-1 is part 1 of ISO/IEC 8859, a standard Character encoding of the Latin alphabet. In HTML, the soft hyphen is encoded as the character entity '­'. HTML, an initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant Markup language for Web pages It provides a means to describe the structure In the Markup languages SGML, HTML, XHTML and XML, a character entity reference is a reference to a particular kind of named

Most text systems consider a hyphen to be a word boundary and a valid point at which to break a line when flowing text. However, this is not always desirable behavior, especially when it could lead to ambiguity (such as in the examples given before, where recreation and re‑creation would be indistinguishable). For this purpose, Unicode also encodes a non-breaking hyphen as U+2011 ( ‑ ). This character looks identical to the regular hyphen, but is not treated as a word boundary.

The ASCII hyphen-minus character is also often used when specifying parameters to programs in a command line interface. The character is usually followed by one or more letters that indicate specific actions. Typically it is called a dash in this context. This is used in many different operating systems, particularly Unix and Unix-like systems. Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer A Unix-like (sometimes shortened to *nix) Operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system while not necessarily conforming DOS and Microsoft Windows also sometimes make use of the hyphen, although the use of a forward slash (/) is more prevalent there. DOS, short for "Disk Operating System" is a shorthand term for several closely related Operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market Microsoft Windows is a series of Software Operating systems and Graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. A parameter by itself that is only a single hyphen without any letters usually means that a program is supposed to handle data coming from the standard input or send data to the standard output. In Unix and Unix-like operating systems as well as certain Programming language interfaces the standard streams are preconnected input and output channels In Unix and Unix-like operating systems as well as certain Programming language interfaces the standard streams are preconnected input and output channels Two hyphen-minus characters ( -- ) are used on some programs to specify "long options" where more descriptive action names are used. This is a common feature of GNU software. GNU ( pronounced) is a computer Operating system composed entirely of Free software.

International Standard dates

Main article: Date and time notation by country

Continental Europeans use the hyphen to delineate parts within a written date. Different style conventions and habits exist around the world for dates and Times in writing and speaking Germans and Slavs also used Roman numerals for the month; 14‑VII‑1789, for example, is one way of writing the first Bastille Day, though this usage is rapidly falling out of favour. Roman numerals are a Numeral system originating in ancient Rome, adapted from Etruscan numerals. Bastille Day is the French national holiday, celebrated on 14 July each year. Plaques on the wall of the Moscow Kremlin are written this way. The Moscow Kremlin ( Russian: Московский Кремль Moskovskiy Kreml) usually referred to as simply The Kremlin, is a historic fortified Usage of hyphens, as opposed to the slashes used in the English language, is specified for international standards. English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States

International standard ISO 8601, which was accepted as European Standard EN 28601 and incorporated into various typographic style guides (e. International standards are Standards developed by international Standards organisations International standards are available for consideration and use worldwide ISO 8601 is an International standard for date and Time representations issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO g. , DIN 5008 in Germany), brought about a new standard using the hyphen. Deutsches Institut für Normung eV ( DIN; in English, the German Institute for Standardization) is the German national organization for Now all official European governmental documents use this. These norms prescribe writing dates using hyphens: 1789-07-14 is the new way of writing the first Bastille Day.

This method has gained influence within North America, as most common computer filesystems make the use of slashes difficult or impossible. Windows uses both \ and / as the directory separator, and / is also used to introduce and separate switches to shell commands. Unix-like systems use / as a directory separator and, while \ is legal in filenames, it is awkward to use as the shell uses it as an escape character. Unix also uses a space followed by a hyphen to introduce switches. The non-year form is also identical apart from the separator used to the standard American representation.

The ISO date format sorts correctly using a default collation, which can be useful in many computing situations including for filenames, so many computer systems and IT technicians have switched to this method. The government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, for example, has switched to this method. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts ( is a state located in the New England region of the northeastern United States.

See also

• Hyphen War
• Double hyphen

References

Others

• Hyphen is the name of a Rock'n'roll Band

External links

• A Grammar Book help for hyphen rules
• Economist Style Guide — Hyphens
• Jukka Korpela, Soft hyphen (SHY) - a hard problem?
• Markus Kuhn, Unicode interpretation of SOFT HYPHEN breaks ISO 8859-1 compatibility. The Hyphen War (in Czech Pomlčková válka, in Slovak Pomlčková vojna &mdash literally " Dash War " was the tongue-in-cheek The double hyphen (＝ ゠ or ⸗ is a punctuation mark that consists of two parallel Hyphens It is not to be confused with two consecutive hyphens (-- which Unicode Technical Committee document L2/03-155R, June 2003.
• Juicio Brennan, Online Lyric Hyphenator (hyphenates English)
• Igor Podlubny, On-line Hyphenator (hyphenates Slovak)
• The United States Government Printing Office Style Manual 2000 6. COMPOUNDING RULES