Hyphens vs. dashes | Punctuation | Khan Academy Video Lecture | Complete Course on English Grammar: Upgrade your Speaking & Listening - Personal Skills

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 um 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 um 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 a 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 line
right and then as it became more and
more prominent more and more populous
what's called an open
compound um then it became online
separated with a - this is what's called
a hyphenated compound make sense 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 cuz everyone knows what that
means
right um so you would use hyphenated
compounds when you're kind of in this
intermediary stage of accepted 'no soul
ike maybe one day in the future
yellow green yeah might just be common
color what right it's everyone's
favorite color so it'll just be smooshed
together with no - today is not that day
he's not that day so there's - there
right I think it's also important to
hyphenate for clarity 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 mm-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 I want to buy my coop
from the coop right my coop from the
coop er go off 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 Opie right so
you want to - it for clarity when you
can make sense so let's bring all this
together right so
made a yellow-green coupe with the coop
okay you all work together to make a
yellow-green coupe
yep equal 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 mm-hmm
you can learn anything Dave it up page
out