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Chocolate Covered or Chocolate-Covered?

By Maeve

Knowing when to hyphenate a word and when to write it as two words or as a compound is a difficult concept for me to master.

According to OWL (Purdue’s Online Writing Lab) guidelines, two or more words that serve as a single adjective before a noun, are hyphenated:

one-way street
well-known author
chocolate-covered peanuts

BUT when these compound modifiers come after a noun, they are not hyphenated:

The peanuts were chocolate covered.
The author was well known.

Not everyone follows the bit about modifiers before a noun.

A Google search comes up with a lot of things covered in chocolate without the hyphen:

How to Make Homemade Chocolate Covered Cherries

CHOCOLATE COVERED PRETZELS

Chocolate Covered Spoons

That’s not to say that I didn’t find hyphenated versions, such as this headline for what seems to me a dubious treat :

Homemade Chocolate-Covered Bacon

In 2007 the Shorter OED made news when the sixth edition dropped the hyphens in 16,000 compounds.

Some of the changes combined formerly hyphenated constructions such as bumble-bee and cry-baby into single words:

bumblebee
chickpea
crybaby
lowlife
pigeonhole

Many formerly-hyphenated words lost their hyphens and won independence as two separate words:

ice cream
pot belly
hobby horse
pin money
test tube
water bed

These words are nouns, not adjectives, but the hyphen or no hyphen question applies to them. Not every dictionary agrees with the OED.

The practical course for writers is to settle on one dictionary of choice and be consistent.

Like so many other linguistic changes that have occurred in recent times, this dumping of the hyphen has been blamed on internet communications. Texters don’t like to bother with hyphens, so hyphens must go!

So why are we still writing e-mail?

Link to the Chocolate-covered Bacon recipe

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Copyright by Daily Writing Tips.

Chocolate Covered or Chocolate-Covered?

Full post as published by Daily Writing Tips on April 07, 2009 (boomark / email).