Overall, hyphen looks like a minus

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the scaled-down, two-volume version of the mammoth 20-volume OED, just got a little shorter.

With the dispatch of a waiter flicking away flyspecks, the editor, Angus Stevenson, eliminated some 16,000 hyphens from the sixth edition, published last month. "People are not confident about using hyphens anymore," he said. "They're not really sure what they're for."

The dictionary is not dropping all hyphens. The ones in certain compounds remain ("well-being," for example), as do those indicating a word break at the right-hand margin, the use for which the versatile punctuation mark — a variation on the slash, the all-purpose medieval punctuation — was invented.

What's getting the heave are most hyphens linking the halves of a compound noun. Some, such as "ice cream," "fig leaf," "hobby horse" and "water bed," have been fractured into two words, while many others, such as "bumblebee," "crybaby" and "pigeonhole," have been squeezed into one.

That "ice cream" and "bumblebee" ever had hyphens suggests an excess of fussiness on the part of older lexicographers and may explain some of Stevenson's annoyance. The issue of proper hyphenation has always vexed the Brits, far more than Americans, and occasioned perhaps the crankiest article in Henry Watson Fowler's "Dictionary of Modern English Usage," first published in 1926.

"The chaos prevailing among writers or printers or both regarding the use of hyphens is discreditable to English education," he began; about halfway through, he threw up his hands and said of the examples he had been citing, "the evidence they afford" is "that common sense is in fact far from common."

Fowler favored hyphens. They sprinkle his text like dandruff and, along with his fetish for the ampersand, give it a musty, old-fashioned look. This is why designers hate to see hyphens flecking the page, and indeed they are antique, unnecessary marks in many instances.

But that's also part of their appeal. They're records of how the language changes, and in the old days, before the Shorter Oxford got into the sundering business, hyphens indicated a sort of halfway point, a way station in the progress of a new usage.

Two terms get linked — "tiddly-wink" or "cell-phone" — and over time, that little hitch is worn away by familiarity. In a few years, for example, people will be amused to discover that email used to be e-mail.

The greatest hyphenator ever was William Shakespeare (or Shak-speare in some contemporary spellings) because he was so busy adding new words, many of them compounds, to English: "sea-change," "leap-frog," "bare-faced," "fancy-free."

John Milton also hyphenated a lot ("dew-drops," "man-slaughter") as did John Donne, who loved compounds such as "death-bed" and "passing-bell," where the hyphen carries almost metaphorical weight, a reminder of what T.S. Eliot called his singular talent for yoking unlike ideas.

Even Stevenson puts in a good word for the hyphen, especially beloved by grammarians, the one that turns a noun phrase into a compound adjective. A slippery-eel salesman, for example, sells slippery eels, while a slippery eel salesman takes your money and slinks away.