Q. Which is correct: “minimum food-safety standards” or “minimum food safety standards”? Thank you.
A. According to the hyphenation table at CMOS 7.89, a phrase like “food safety”—in which one noun (“food”) modifies another (“safety”)—would be hyphenated as a modifier before another noun. In other words, you’d write “food-safety standards” (with a hyphen). Adding “minimum” doesn’t change that: “minimum food-safety standards.”
That’s Chicago style, strictly interpreted, and you could stop there.
But a look at Google Ngram Viewer suggests that the phrase “food safety standards” has rarely appeared with a hyphen in published prose, maybe because standards for food safety and safety standards for food are pretty much the same thing, so a hyphen isn’t needed for clarity. A hyphen in the larger phrase—“minimum food-safety standards”—is a little more helpful (preventing a momentary misreading in which safety standards apply to “minimum food,” whatever that might be), but not much.
You’ve landed on one of those gray areas that tend to (or tends to?) drive writers and editors up the wall. A hyphen may help some readers—and it’s rarely considered wrong to add one in this scenario (see CMOS 7.85)—but it doesn’t seem to be customary in this particular phrase. If you’re looking to justify leaving it out, cite common usage and CMOS 7.84: “Where no ambiguity could result . . . hyphenation is unnecessary.”
Q. In your hyphenation guide, adjectival phrases are addressed: “Hyphenated before a noun; usually open after a noun.” Would the adjectival phrase “one-on-one” apply? The dictionary lists it only with hyphens, but I’m dealing with a sentence where it seems the hyphens would be unnecessary: “Coaches are available to meet one-on-one.”
A. In your example, “one-on-one” functions as an adverb rather than as an adjective (it modifies the verb to meet). And in general, a phrase that’s listed in Merriam-Webster with hyphens retains its hyphens if used as an adverb. Compare “day by day.” That expression, which is listed in Merriam-Webster without hyphens, would be hyphenated only as an adjective before a noun. For example, you would “take things day by day” (adv.) but “make a day-by-day assessment” (adj.).
Q. What is the correct way to hyphenate school grade levels, “fifth-grade” or “fifth grade”? And “fifth-grader” or “fifth grader”? Thank you.
A. Nouns like fifth grade and fifth grader are both left open:
Not all of us made it past the eighth grade.
Some second graders are more advanced than others.
Adjective forms, however, are hyphenated:
Our fifth-grade lessons included more writing than reading.
See also CMOS 7.89, section 1, under “number, ordinal, + noun.”
Q. I know an en dash separates sports scores, representing the word “to” (e.g., “the Lions won 34–6”), but what about win/loss records? In this case one would say, for example, “They ended the season with a record of 10 and 4.” So should this be expressed with an en dash or a hyphen? 10-4 or 10–4?
A. Though it’s not strictly a range, a 10–4 record expresses a comparison, as in “ten wins compared to four losses.” This makes records analogous to scores; a score of 34–6 could be restated as “thirty-four points compared to six.” So use an en dash for both.
Write “win–loss record” with an en dash too. Though the forward slash in your question makes a lot of sense—it suggests alternatives, as in “wins, on the one hand, and losses, on the other”—an en dash in “win–loss” will be consistent with its parallel use in expressions like “10–4.”
Finally, it should be noted that sports scores and records have appeared far more often with hyphens than with en dashes in published sources. That’s what you’ll find in the AP Stylebook, the primary guide for many sports reporters. The Associated Press, like many of the news sources it serves, doesn’t use en dashes. If you’re a fan of the en dash, score one for Chicago over AP.
Q. I work as an editor, and we use CMOS as our primary source. My boss recently told me to hyphenate “machine-scored” in “the items were machine-scored,” because of a rule she cited about compounds formed with a verb. I can’t find a rule like this in CMOS. Is the hyphen Chicago style?
A. Chicago doesn’t require a hyphen in “machine scored” unless it serves as a modifier before a noun (e.g., “a machine-scored test”); after a noun, as in your example, the hyphen would be omitted. See the hyphenation guide, section 2, “noun + participle” (at CMOS 7.89). Compare “air-conditioned,” which is hyphenated in all positions, and “handcrafted,” which is always closed. Those terms derive from the verbs “air-condition” and “handcraft,” respectively, which are listed as such in Merriam-Webster (see also “phrases, verbal” in section 2 of the guide in CMOS).
The verb “machine score,” on the other hand, isn’t in Merriam-Webster. But that doesn’t mean your organization can’t choose to hyphenate it as a matter of house style. If you do—a decision that might make sense, for example, as the style for a company that routinely scores standardized tests and therefore uses the term more often than the average writer or publisher—then hyphenate it as a verb and as an adjective, in all positions in a sentence. For the noun, you could use “air conditioner” and “air-conditioning” as your models, leaving only “machine scorer” open.
Q. In my office we have noticed a trend in Merriam-Webster to show previously closed compound words as hyphenated, such as “antiracist” and “antilabor.” CMOS clearly has a spare hyphenation style and lists prefixes as usually closed. Which should we follow when the two sources disagree? I would lean toward continuing to close compounds like “antiracist” and “antilabor” and use CMOS as our source, but we have been going in circles for a year now on this debate. Please help.
A. What you are noticing is the result of Merriam-Webster’s decision to create individual entries for a whole bunch of compounds that in earlier versions of its dictionaries—both the one at Merriam-Webster.com and the printed Collegiate—were simply listed under the applicable prefixes. These entries were added after the publication of CMOS 17.
In the earlier lists, most of these terms were closed, clearly as a matter of editorial principle rather than (as for the main dictionary entries) common usage. For example, if you consult a first printing of the Collegiate (11th ed., 2003), you’ll find, under the prefix anti-, “antifur” and “antiwar”—along with “antiracist” and “antilabor” and dozens of other closed compounds. Only a term like “anti-immigration” (double i) or “anti-Soviet” (capital S) merits a hyphen. Under non- and pre-, hyphenation is strictly limited to terms with capital letters (e.g., “nonnews” but “non-Marxist” and “preelectric” but “pre-Christmas”).
And though the majority of compounds formed with prefixes remain closed in Merriam-Webster, all but one of the unhyphenated examples mentioned above are now hyphenated, either as a main entry or as a variant (“antifur” is the sole exception).
Going forward, there are some definite advantages to following the editorial approach described in section 4 of the hyphenation guide at CMOS 7.89. It’s easier than looking up each term in Merriam-Webster, and the results will be more consistent. Plus, you can invoke rule no. 3 (in the intro to section 4) and add a hyphen to a compound like “antifur,” which is awkward without one, despite what the dictionary might have. Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster can continue to act as arbiter in any remaining cases of doubt.
For some additional perspective, see our Shop Talk post on this subject.
Q. CMOS 6.81 says en dashes can be used to set off campuses of universities, as in “University of Wisconsin–Madison.” When abbreviating the university such that it’s one word, would it make sense to change the en dash to a hyphen? For example, would you write “UW-Madison” with a hyphen because “UW” is now one word?
A. Though either decision could be defended, we prefer to leave en dashes intact in the abbreviated forms of names that include one when spelled out. In other words, the dash survives the shortening of the words without itself undergoing a reduction in length: “UW–Madison.” This decision will lend an appearance of consistency to documents that feature both the abbreviated and spelled-out forms.
Q. Books that can be read aloud are known as “read-alouds.” Should this term be hyphenated or not?
A. Whenever you can’t find the answer to a specific hyphenation question, an analogy can be your friend. In this case, we would tend to hyphenate “read-alouds” on the principle that it is grammatically similar in construction to the hyphenated noun form “sing-along” (the plural of which would be “sing-alongs”). Not only does “sing-along” describe a similar activity—it also has an entry in Merriam-Webster.
Q. I am curious why CMOS hyphenates “president-elect” but leaves “vice president elect” open. Would “vice president–elect” (with an en dash) not be more consistent? And why is “president-elect” hyphenated even when the term doesn’t precede a noun?
A. Good questions. The word “elect” is an adjective that’s being used postpositively, or after the noun. A postpositive adjective sometimes joins to the noun it modifies with a hyphen (e.g., “knight-errant”), but in most cases it does not (“professor emeritus,” “surgeon general,” “president pro tempore”).
Merriam-Webster includes an entry for “president-elect” as a noun, which is why we hyphenate that term (the hyphen may help prevent a misreading of “elect” as a verb), but it doesn’t include a corresponding entry for “vice president” with elect. Our reluctance to require an en dash with a lowercase open compound (see CMOS 6.80) factored into our decision to continue to leave that term open as a noun.
We also looked at government documents. In the Twentieth Amendment to the US Constitution, one of the few such documents that uses the terms, you’ll find “President elect” and “Vice President elect” (no hyphens). Another official document, the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, has “President-elect” and “Vice-President-elect” (one hyphen and two, respectively), but “Vice President” (without a hyphen) when “elect” isn’t tacked on. Neither document uses these as titles before a name.
But in the real world, these terms are used as titles before a name, and had we shown examples of this usage in our hyphenation table at CMOS 7.89 (or under “Titles and Offices” in chapter 8), we would have advised either two hyphens (“vice-president-elect So-and-So”) or an en dash (“vice president–elect So-and-So”). But, had we capitalized the term as a formal title, the en dash would have prevailed (though “elect,” which isn’t part of the title, would remain lowercase): “Vice President–elect Kamala Harris.” (For our preference for lowercase in a phrase like “former vice president Joe Biden” versus uppercase in a phrase like “Vice President Pence,” see CMOS 8.21.)
Uppercase or lower, the arc of editorial history appears to be bending toward greater use of the en dash, as en dash–literate questions like yours continue to demonstrate. Will they play a bigger role in future editions of CMOS? Perhaps we should take a vote.
Q. I know an em dash marks an interruption in dialogue:
“I thought I might—”
“Might what?” she demanded.
But what happens if the same person speaks after the interruption? For example, “Can you bring me a— socket wrench, is that what you call it?” Is that space after the em dash correct?
A. Your space after the dash does makes a little bit of sense—but it doesn’t quite work. Because even if there is some logic to it, will people read that space as you intended it? Very possibly not, and definitely not if the dash happens to fall at the end of a line—as dashes are prone to do. Any editorial decision that is likely to be missed by readers or obscured by context—or that could be lost if quoted (for example, by someone following a style that puts a space before and after a dash, which would render your example meaningless)—is one that should be reconsidered.
So, either delete the space:
“Can you bring me a—socket wrench, is that what you call it?”
Or, if you want to somehow convey the extra pause or break that the space is trying to communicate, mark the interruption in some other way:
“Can you bring me a . . . socket wrench—is that what you call it?”
“Can you bring me a—what do you call it?—a socket wrench?”
“Can you bring me a”—he hesitated—“a socket wrench? Is that what you call it?”
In sum, be wary of any editorial innovation that relies on a mere space to get across the intended meaning. It has a good chance of being lost in translation.