The hyphen may be small, but its presence – or absence – in a word can make an enormous difference to the meaning.
The English language includes several instances of words where the decision to add or leave out a hyphen can matter. A lot.
And I made it my mission to find them…
It all started with a casual remark
The words that gave me the idea for this blog post were remark and re-mark (which I recently spotted being used incorrectly on a communication from school, no less).
To remark is to say as a comment or notice something, whereas to re-mark is to mark an exam paper again.
Other similar pairs of hyphenated words
Looking through my trusted copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, I found several other pairs of words where the addition of a hyphen completely alters the meaning:
| Recover (v) | Get well again | Re-cover (v) | Put a new cover on |
| Redress (v) | Remedy or set right | Re-dress (v) | Dress again |
| Reform (v) | Make changes to something in order to improve it | Re-form (v) | Form or cause to be formed again |
| Represent (v) | Be appointed to act or speak for | Re-present (v) | Present again |
| Reserve (v) | Retain for future use | Re-serve (v) | Serve again |
| Resign (v) | Voluntarily leave a job or position | Re-sign (v) | Sign (a document or contract) again |
| Resoluble (adj) | Able to be resolved | Re-soluble (adj) | Able to dissolve or be dissolved again |
| Coop (n) | Cage or pen for confining poultry | Co-op (n) | Cooperative organisation |
Are you starting to see a pattern yet? It’s not hard to spot!
With each of the words in the second column, the prefixes re (once more) or co (joint/mutual) need to be followed by a hyphen to avoid confusion – distinguishing them from an existing word offering what would otherwise be the same spelling but a totally different meaning.
So, there you have it. Quite remarkable, don’t you think? Or should that be re-markable?!
(image via)
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