Hyphens vs. dashes

hello grammarians hello Paige hi David so today we're gonna learn about hyphens and what a hyphen is it's a little stick like this as opposed to a dash which is about twice as long and people confuse them a lot but they have very different functions so what a hyphen is used to do is it's used to join two words into one alright so for example we have the word yellow that's a word with meaning we have the word green that's a word with meaning and we may have a word that does fit right in between those two or two at once like chartreuse or whatever okay you know but not everybody wants to use the word chartreuse kind of a kind of a wacky word so instead of doing that you might just want to say yellow green and connect yellow and green with a hyphen so yeah so a hyphen is joining these two things but let's say we had a sentence like her hair was yellow-green where her eyes you know and so we're still separating the words yellow and green with a stick but a dash is longer and instead of uniting yellow-green it's separating them the way that you know a semicolon might yeah it's not it's not one thing it's she has yellow hair and green eyes if she had yellow green hair that would be a different story yes so what's neat about hyphens and what's kind of confusing about hyphens is that whether or not we use a hyphen indicates how common a compound phrase is so Brian Garner in Garner's modern American usage and in the Chicago Manual of style draws this distinction with compound words and I should first say what a compound word is right a compound word is two words smack together somehow right so so if we take the so once upon a time at the dawn of the internet page okay when dinosaurs walked the earth and I was just a wee little baby you would refer to getting on my right and then as it became more and more prominent and more and more populous what's called an open compound then it became online separated with a - this is what's called a hyphenated compound and now when we think about it it's just an adjective and it's online and this is a closed compound right okay if you came closed because everyone right so you would use hyphenated compounds when you're kind of in this intermediary stage of accepted miss so like maybe one day in the future yellow green yeah might just be a common color right it's everyone's favorite color so it'll just be smushed together with no - today is not that day he's not that day so there's a knife in there right I think it's also important to hyphenate for clarity mm-hmm let me explain what I mean by that so first of all when I say - itthat's just a word that means to put a hyphen in something yes to - if I so if a compound word could be misconstrued or misunderstood you should throw in a hyphen or check a dictionary or a style guide so okay so page yes I would like to raise some chickens good idea so in order to raise some chickens I need a chicken coop right yeah true and a coop right Co Opie is a place where chickens live it's like a little enclosure yeah but let's say I want to buy this coop from a community run business right what's called a cooperative business or a co-op hmm well now sometimes it appears like that like that like Co Opie but if I said something like I want to buy my coop from the coop like that it'll end up looking like this my coop from the coop right co-op from the coop or something so in order to be clear it really helps to put in that little - and that's the difference right so you're using this to say oh you know this is actually short for cooperative you know because it's operated by a bunch of people working together as opposed to this word which is just Co LP right so you want to - it for clarity when you can make sense so let's bring all this together right so I made a yellow-green coupe with the coop okay you all work together to make a yellow-green coupe yep so we're connecting yellow and green with a - we're connecting co-op with a - to differentiate it from this word coop and that's basically what you use hyphens for yeah you can learn anything give it up page out