Health care, healthcare or health-care? Make up, makeup or make-up? Water ski, water-ski or waterski? Cell phone, cellphone or cell-phone? A lot of questions posed in this column elicit the answer: ...

'False friends' are words in one language that look like words in another language, but which have very different meanings. There are a number of false friends in German, where the words look ...

According to my 1933 Oxford Universal Dictionary, “good-bye” and “co-operate” are hyphenated, neither “leg room” nor “birth rate” can be run together into single word, and “teenager” doesn’t exist.

One of the regular features we do on Twitter is "Why we need hyphens": phrases that have different meanings depending on whether there's a hyphen. These usually occur when a noun has a compound ...

Meghan Walbert is Lifehacker's Managing Editor. She has a degree in journalism and has worked at Lifehacker as a writer and editor since 2018, covering parenting, foster care, online child safety, and ...

Hyphens are only used to combine certain words together. They are not strong enough to set off phrases or words from a sentence. Use hyphens in the following situations: Use in compound numbers and ...