- 1
When you hyphenate something, you join two words — or two beats of a long word — with a little dash called a . People do this so the pieces are read as one idea, as in well-known or twenty-one. You also hyphenate when a long word will not fit at the end of a line: you break it between beats and put a at the end of the first line. Though actually, English speakers do not all agree which words need a . Older books hyphenate more; today many people write email, not e-mail. Teachers and editors still care, because the dash can change meaning: a man-eating shark is not a man eating shark. The common use is the verb. You can also meet hyphenate as a noun for a word written with a , but that use is quieter and more for specialists.
用連字號連接、加連字號（對岸較常說「連字符」）
組成hyphen (the little dash) + -ate (makes a verb: to put a hyphen on). Hyphen itself comes from Greek, from a phrase meaning “under one” — two things written as one.
同家族的字
- hyphenthe dash itself; to hyphenate is to use one
- hyphenationthe noun for the act or the rules of using a hyphen
- hyphenatedthe form that means already joined with a hyphen
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
hyphenateverb詞源 1/ˈhaɪf(ə)ˌneɪt/
- 1
to break a word at the end of a line according to the hyphenation rules by adding a hyphen on the end of the line.
- 2
to join words or syllables with a hyphen.
- you have to hyphenate his surname as it's double-barrelled
hyphenatenoun詞源 2/ˈhaɪfənət/
- 1
A person or object with multiple duties, abilities or characteristics, such as "writer-director", "actor-model", or "singer-songwriter".
- 2
A person whose ethnicity is a multi-word hyphenated term, such as "African-American".
- We seem to have settled on African-American, and at first glance it certainly does seem logical. […] Not to mention what happens when hyphenates marry other hyphenates and have baby hyphenates.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。