One of the best pieces of advice that I received when starting out in journalism was: ‘Don’t worry about hyphens, that way lies madness.’ Wise words indeed – life is too short to worry about whether two words should stay separate, be hyphenated or combined into one word. World wide web, world-wide web, or worldwide web? Who cares? In fact, the above is a perfect example of what tends to happen to compound adjectives in our ever-changing language. Two words are hyphenated and later merge into one.

Whether to hyphenate or not comes down to a style choice as most people do not know how to use them ‘correctly’. In the English-speaking world, there is no pompous arbiter such as the Académie Française, which determines what is ‘correct’ usage and what isn’t, and what’s more, you won’t find every compound adjective in the dictionary. Most of us in the UK didn’t really learn English grammar at school, not in my day, so we just muddle through. The current government, however, is making up for lost time by exposing primary school pupils to the joys of university-level grammar, which will probably put the next generation off from taking an interest as well.

To explain, a simple adjective describes a noun – ‘The car is blue’ – ‘the blue car’. As does a compound adjective – ‘the car costs two pounds’ becomes ‘the two-pound car’. The hyphen goes in to make the two words like one word and to indicate the ‘two’ is linked to the ‘pounds’ not the car.  ‘The mast is two metres high’ becomes, as a compound adjective, ‘the two-metre-high mast’. You will notice that the plurals ‘pounds’ ‘metres’ become singular within the compound adjective. I don’t know why that happens, but we English speakers do it instinctively without even thinking about it. It is quite a difficult one for learners of English to master, however. So now you can clearly see the difference between a sentence that is state of the art and a state-of-the-art sentence, no?

When it is probably prudent to be bothered about hyphens is when your meaning is not clear. For example: ‘the black cab driver’ versus ‘the black-cab driver’. The former is a taxi driver who is black whereas the latter is a driver of the London-type black taxi cab, so the hyphen matters if you want to communicate your meaning well.

Otherwise, does it really matter? I would argue that as long as the meaning of the sentence is clear, then no, it really doesn’t. Would you hyphenate ‘clearly marked space’ when the ‘clearly’ clearly is an adverb referring to the marked not the space?

As I said, don’t worry about hyphens, that way lies madness.