[Hyphens At Line-End]
The book’s two-column format resulted in a great many line-end hyphens. Most hyphenated words were unique, so the ordinary tests (“Is this word, or a structurally similar one, hyphenated on its other occurrences?”) could seldom be used.
Line-end hyphens in cross-references (“see”, “see also”, “cf.”) were kept or omitted based on the form of the cross-referenced headword. Note that hyphenization in this situation is very inconsistent. Except in the Additions, cross-references often omit a mid-line hyphen that is present in the referenced word, or include one that is absent.
Line-end hyphens were retained in past participles in i-, y- and equivalent, and after the prefixes out- and to-; they were omitted before common endings such as -lich, -ship, -ness, -full. They were removed after Middle English un-, but retained after Anglo-Saxon un-.
The remaining line-end hyphens were omitted unless they were in the same location (morphological boundary) as the hyphen in the headword, or if the hyphenated word was a compound. Within these two groups, final decisions were based on more fluid criteria such as internal consistency within an entry, or hyphenization of other words from the same source. Words printed with these types of ambiguous hyphens are lightly underlined in the e-text. The position of omitted hyphens is generally obvious, and has not been explicitly marked.