In a series, hyphens are suspended. [Example:] Do you prefer first-, second-, or third-class tickets?
Hyphenate the written form of fractions and of compound numbers from twenty-one to ninety-nine. [Example:] One-fourth of my salary goes to pay my child care expenses. Use a hyphen with the prefixes all-, ex-, and self- and with the suffix -elect. [Examples:] The charity is funneling more money into self-help projects. Anne King is our club’s president-elect. A hyphen is used in some words to avoid ambiguity or to separate awkward double or triple letters. Without the hyphen, there would be no way to distinguish between words such as re-creation and recreation. [Examples:] Bicycling in the city is my favorite form of recreation. The film was praised for its astonishing re-creation of nineteenth-century London. [. . . .] If a word must be divided at the end of a line, divide it correctly ” (Hacker, A Writer’s Reference 300-302). Consult a dictionary if you are unsure as to where a word should be divided.
