Spelling guidelines
10. Hyphens, and one word or two?
It is of great importance to gain a general picture of what kind of language English is with regard to compound expressions. While German is a language where nouns are written together as one word to form a compound, English goes the other way: the words making up a compound expression are usually written as separate words. Dutch would appear to be somewhere in between German and English in that there is a preference for compounds being written as one word, but there is also a fast growing tendency to use the hyphen or even write words separately, possibly under influence from English.
Not surprisingly, Dutch writers of English make two kinds of mistake: they write too many compounds as one word, and they have a tendency to overhyphenate:
 | the Opiumact | should read | the Opium Act |
| textdata | should read | text data |
| winterseason | should read | winter season |
| research-project | should read | research project |
| group-interaction | should read | group interaction |
| minimum-income | should read | minimum income |
However, the situation is by no means straightforward. English does indeed make use of all three options: one word, two words, and hyphenation. The best way to look at them is as a reflection of the increasing frequency of an expression. Schoolteacher, for instance, started off life as two words; then it came to be written with a hyphen; and finally it was written as one word. The same has presumably happened with doorbell and gunfire, as well as nouns formed from phrasal verbs, such as splashdown and turnout. A common feature of these words is that they very rarely have more than three syllables and there is only one stressed syllable, namely the first one.
Our basic advice is to write compounds as separate words in English, unless you have good reason to do otherwise. This means that you should not hyphenate words just because you believe that they belong together in some way. Rather, you should restrict their use to (a) words hyphenated in the dictionary, and (b) cases where the text becomes much easier to understand. For example, compound adjectives made up of adjective + noun or noun + adjective or participle are always spelled with a hyphen:
| a nineteenth-century novel | |
| poverty-stricken neighbourhoods | |
| habit-forming activities |
The same goes for when you make a compound verb; here, too, a hyphen is needed to ensure that the two words are taken together by the reader:
| to air-condition | |
| to water-cool |
Second, a hyphen is valuable when you wish to modify a noun by an expression which is itself a compound:
| medium-term developments | but | developments in the medium term | |
| a case-study approach | but | an approach involving a case study |
A rather unfortunate problem for Dutch users arises because of the lack of an equivalent in English for the handy use of
the hyphen in Dutch expressions such as in- en uitvoer. You just
cannot write im- and export in English.
And extravagant
formulations such as Sun- and holidays, as spotted
on an Amsterdam parking meter, are definitely out. Rather, you have to
either spell out both words in full, or refrain from signalling the meaning relation altogether and hope that the reader will be
alert enough to work out the meaning from contextual clues:
| in- en uitvoer | import and export | |
| spannings- en rekvelden | tension and strain fields | |
| groot- en kleinschalige ontwikkelingen | small and large-scale developments | |
| fruitmes en -schaal | fruit knife and (fruit) bowl |
An important exception to this rule concerns prefixes which are normally hyphenated anyway. Thus it would not be considered wrong to write pre- and post-industrial.