Word.ws English Dictionary

‐

‐ punctuation: joins the components of coordinative compounds, with equal components.

Punctuation

‐ (name hyphen)

  1. Joins the components of coordinative compounds, with equal components.
    • secretary‐general; yellow‐green; a here‐today‐gone‐tomorrow attitude; kitchen‐dinette‐office
    Synonyms:
    and, hyphen, -hyphen-, cum, -cum-, /, slash
  2. Joins the components of subordinative compounds, with a dominant component or head.
    • a has‐been; cholesterol‐free; short‐changing
  3. Joins prefixes and suffixes according to stylistic rules, often to avoid confusion in pronunciation or meaning.
    • ultra‐ambitious
    • I must re‐press the shirt.
    Synonyms:
    ·, ◌̈
  4. Connects words in a compound modifier according to various stylistic rules.
    • real‐world examples
  5. (Internet) Used as sentence-final punctuation.

Synonyms of ‐

Forms of ‐

namehyphen

Questions about ‐

What does ‐ mean?
‐ means joins the components of coordinative compounds, with equal components.
What part of speech is ‐?
‐ is a punctuation.

Words near ‐ in the dictionary

  1. ṣādēs
  2. Ṭūbā
  3. ạ
  4. ẽ
  5. ị
  6. ‐
  7. –
  8. —a
  9. —hole
  10. —oz
  11. —r

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ‐ (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “‐.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/%E2%80%90. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.