Is the glass half full or half-empty?
In-Word Hyphenation
Meaning also matters when you are trying to decide whether to use a hyphen within a word. For example, if you didn't press your jeans properly and you need to re-press them, you would write that with a hyphen: I need to re-press my jeans. Otherwise, people might think you mean the verb repress meaning "to stifle or put down." You re-press jeans, but repress bad memories.
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You need to re-press your jeans.
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You need to repress those bad memories.
A dictionary is also helpful for figuring out less obvious cases of in-word hyphenation. Fortunately, there are at least a few solid rules. You use a hyphen when when you're joining a prefix to a word that must be capitalized and when joining a letter to a word. For example, you use a hyphen in
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Anti-American
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Un-American
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Pre-Mesozoic
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X-ray
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A-list
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T-shirt
Also, you use hyphens to write out numbers from twenty-one to ninety-nine. For example
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Thirty-five
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Sixty-four
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Ninety-three
Hyphens are a complicated topic and I promise I'll do another show about other hyphen questions in the future.
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Hyphen image, kzys at Flickr. CC BY 2.0
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