Is the hyphen making a dash for extinction?

from The Times, August 21, 2003
Is the hyphen making a dash for extinction?
By Robin Young

THE hyphen may be heading for extinction, according to the editors of a new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English published today.
Angus Stevenson, one of the editors, said yesterday: “Our research showed that overall the hyphen is now used only half as much as it was ten years ago.” And that is despite a new use found for aberrant hyphens, which are now being slotted into phrasal verbs, as in “now is the time to top-up your pension” or “this website was set-up by Vicky”.
But Mr Stevenson said: “This use of hyphens is not yet accepted as standard English and should be avoided in careful writing.”
It is easy, though, to see how it has come about. “Nouns derived from phrasal verbs, such as ‘it’s a set-up’ or ‘time for a top-up’ have long been typically hyphenated,” Mr Stevenson said. “The new usage is an extension of that.”
Up to 20 or 30 years ago, he added, compounds formed by placing one noun in front of another were generally hyphenated, as in “fish-shop” or “dog-bowl”. Now such words are generally written separately (eg cat flap) or run together, as in “website” or “airfare”.
“In the 1950s,” Mr Stevenson added, “even familiar words such as teenager and lipstick were often hyphenated, and street signs used to hyphenate names: for example, St-Giles or West-Street”.
The Oxford lexicographers assessed the hyphen’s present parlous condition by comparing two corpuses of complete texts, databases of 100 million words each, prepared ten years apart. They discovered that there were twice as many hyphens in the British National Corpus, prepared in the early 1990s, as in the new Oxford English Corpus. Mr Stevenson said: “Hyphens are still found clarifying longer phrases, such as ‘trade-union reforms’, or where there is a verb involved, as in ‘calcium-derived substances’.” Apostrophes, Mr Stevenson thinks, may be next to go.
Tim Austin, the author of The Times Style and Usage Guide, said that it would be a “great pity” if the hyphen were to disappear altogether.
“It enables language to be used in a fuller and richer way, as indeed does the apostrophe,” said Mr Austin, who recently retired after ten years as chief revise editor of The Times. But he added that hyphenation was “always a very contentious area” and every media organisation needed its own rules on the topic.
* Oxford Dictionary of English, Oxford University Press, £35.

Do some simple research of your own to find out whether your reading confirms the changes described above.

What will be gained and what lost by the death of the hyphen?

Do you agree that "It enables language to be used in a fuller and richer way"?

Is the apostrophe likely to go the same way?

What will be gained and what lost by the death of the apostrophe