In Hollywood, an actor who produces his own film becomes a “hyphenate”: an actor-producer. If she also directs, she’s an actor-producer-director. Even beyond Hollywood, the simple hyphen is a way to make a single word out of two or more words.

One helping dog is Hasty, who is not your run-of-the-mill golden retriever: he can locate avalanche victims.

At Lake Nakuru in Kenya, you can get an awe-inspiring view of thousands of pink flamingos feeding on the lake’s plentiful algae.

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Spud Webb was only five feet seven inches tall when he slam-dunked over the reigning champion to win the 1986 NBA dunk contest.

As in the first two sentences, hyphenated words are often adjectives, but they may be nouns or verbs (as in the third sentence).

Hyphens have three common uses:

The following examples will give you more details about how to use hyphens like a first-class grammarian.

A compound word is most commonly a word formed from two or more separate words put together.

down + hearted = downhearted

fire + works = fireworks

key + board = keyboard

A compound word can also be made of two words commonly used together. The two words in the phrase remain separate but function as one.

cloud nine   stock market   vice president

Compound words are also formed from two or more words joined by a hyphen or hyphens.

happy-go-lucky   long-term   second-rate

A hyphen may also be used in a compound word that has one or more elements beginning with a capital letter.

pre-Enlightenment   Picasso-like half-Mexican,

half-Chilean

What do the hyphenated words in the following sentence have in common?

Women’s basketball has seen many record-breaking athletes who dazzled with high-scoring games and last-second shots.

All three hyphenated words function as adjectives. Although hyphenated words can function as other parts of speech, they are often adjectives with special rules for punctuation.

Compound adjectives preceding the noun they modify should be hyphenated.

At six feet one inch, Seimone Augustus has such great ball-handling skills that she had double-digit scores in almost all of her high school games.

Compound adjectives following the noun they modify should not be hyphenated.

In the WNBA, Augustus continues to display her skills at ball handling, with her regular-season scoring average in double digits.

The adverb well, when paired with an adjective, follows the same hyphenation rules as adjectives in the previous example.

Augustus is well known for continuing her well-executed shooting in playoff games after the regular season is over.

How do you hyphenate a series of compound words when they all have the same second word? Omit that word in all but the last adjective of the series.

Augustus was equally skilled in making one-, two-, and three-point shots.

Do not use a hyphen to link an adverb ending in -ly with an adjective.

In playoff games, Augustus’s scoring has been extremely consistent with her average of nineteen points per game.

Prefixes and suffixes are elements added to a word to refine or change its meaning. An element added at the beginning of a root word is a prefix; one at the end is a suffix. Some prefixes and suffixes require hyphens.

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A hyphen is always used after the prefixes all-, ex-, and self-, and before the suffix -elect.

Several presidents had self-limited terms, declining to run again, although as ex-president, Teddy Roosevelt regretted his decision and tried to make a comeback.

In 1944, FDR made the all-important decision to run for a fourth term and was soon president-elect, but he served only two months of that final term.

A hyphen is also used where the added prefix or suffix creates a double vowel, except a double e.

James Buchanan may not have been anti-intimacy, but he was the only U.S. president who never married.

The only president who was reelected but resigned during his second term was Richard Nixon.

A hyphen can also be used where the added prefix/suffix makes pronunciation of the word confusing.

Theodore Roosevelt was not only a far-ranging explorer but also the first president to ride in an automobile.

Numbers, when spelled out, use a hyphen in two cases: fractions and the compound whole numbers from twenty-one to ninety-nine. This applies to the adjective form of numbers as well.

Lyndon Johnson, the thirty-sixth president, was elected in 1964 with three-fifths of the vote, the widest margin in history, but he chose not to run again in 1968.

A hyphen should be used to indicate inclusive numbers.

If you get a paperback copy of President Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, you can read about President John Quincy Adams on pages 29-50.