title-deeds
title-page
to-day
top-mast
topsy-turvy
up-to-date[23]
water-course
week-day
year-book
Half an inch, half a dozen, &c., require no hyphens. Print the following also without hyphens:
any one
cast iron
common sense (adj. and noun together)
court martial
dare say
easy chair
every one
fellow men
for ever
good humour
good nature
good night
head master[24]
high priest
high road
ill health
ill luck
ill nature
no one
plum pudding
post office
revenue office
some one
union jack
FOOTNOTES:
[21] See Oxford Dict., Vol. I, page xiii, art. ‘Combinations’, where Sir James Murray writes: ‘In many combinations the hyphen becomes an expression of unification of sense. When this unification and specialization has proceeded so far that we no longer analyse the combination into its elements, but take it in as a whole, as in blackberry, postman, newspaper, pronouncing it in speech with a single accent, the hyphen is usually omitted, and the fully developed compound is written as a single word. But as this also is a question of degree, there are necessarily many compounds as to which usage has not yet determined whether they are to be written with the hyphen or as single words.’
And again, in The Schoolmasters’ Year-book for 1903 Sir James Murray writes: ‘There is no rule, propriety, or consensus of usage in English for the use or absence of the hyphen, except in cases where grammar or sense is concerned; as in a day well remembered, but a well-remembered day, the sea of a deep green, a deep-green sea, a baby little expected, a little-expected baby, not a deep green sea, a little expected baby.... Avoid Headmaster, because this implies one stress, Héadmaster, and would analogically mean “master of heads”, like schoolmaster, ironmaster.... Of course the hyphen comes in at once in combinations and derivatives, as head-mastership.’
[22] ‘The hyphen is often used when a writer wishes to mark the fact that he is using not a well-known compound verb, but re- as a living prefix attached to a simple verb (re-pair = pair again); also usually before e (re-emerge), and sometimes before other vowels (re-assure, usually reassure); also when the idea of repetition is to be emphasized, especially in such phrases as make and re-make.’—The Concise Oxford Dictionary (1911), p. 694.