Column: A Word, Please: Making compounds can sometimes be complicated

A reader asked me recently how to write the word “warmonger.”

“I was going to Google it, but it seemed better to ask an expert instead,” she noted.

Web searches can be an invaluable tool when you want to keep mistakes out of your writing. I use Google all the time in my proofreading for things such as celebrity name spellings and how to write proper names.

But for the one-word, two-word or hyphenated conundrum, Google is pretty useless. All it can tell you is whether a form is popular — not whether it’s correct.

For example, “cellphone” gets 263 million hits. “Cell phone” with a space gets 195 million. Popularity counts — some. At the very least, there’s safety in numbers.

So if you use any form popular on Google you’re somewhat shielded from the judgment of nitpickers. But if you’re in one of those situations where you need every word to be letter perfect, this won’t do. Instead, you need to understand a bit about compounds.

Some compounds are created by combining two whole words: war monger, health care, whale watching, best selling. Others are created by adding a prefix to a root word like “pre” and “existing” or “un” and “American.”

There’s no simple formula that will tell you how to make these combos. For whole words, how you combine them depends on whether you plan to use your compound as adjective, noun or verb. For prefixes and suffixes, hyphenation depends on rules that vary from one editing style to the next.

The easiest compounds use two whole words to make an adjective. “Moisture” and “wicking” can team up to modify “fabric,” which makes the compound an adjective. Compound adjectives and adverbs are usually hyphenated: moisture-wicking fabric.

But if your compound is a very common one, check a dictionary first. A “handmade sweater” uses no hyphen because “handmade” is a closed compound in leading dictionaries.

There are two exceptions to this hyphenation rule. One is for “ly” adverbs. You don’t hyphenate those. A “happily married couple” isn’t hyphenated. The other exception is more like a gray area. The rules say to hyphenate compound modifiers when doing so aids comprehension.

Built right into the rule is a perfect excuse to ignore it. If a hyphen does nothing for the reader, you can skip it.

If you’re making a noun like “warmonger,” there’s even less guidance available. The hyphenation rules that tell you how to handle modifiers such as “moisture-wicking” don’t mention how to make compound nouns such as “warmonger” and “crowd watching.”

For these, start with a dictionary. That’s how I learned that “warmonger” exists as a closed form and that “healthcare” is a closed form in some dictionaries but not others.

That works only for common terms, not expressions you’re putting together yourself. You won’t find “crowd-watching,” “crowdwatching” or “crowd watching” in a dictionary.

If you want to create a compound to use as a noun and it’s not in the dictionary, use your best judgment. “Crowd-watching is fun” and “Crowd watching is fun” are both valid.

Verbs work the same way. If you want to “fast track” your career, you won’t find any help in Merriam-Webster for the verb form. It is, however, listed as a noun, as in “Get on the fast track.”

And because “fasttrack” looks terrible and “fast-track” isn’t much better, you could decide that “fast track your career” is the best way to use it as a verb.

Prefixes and suffixes sometimes take a hyphen, as in un-American, and some don’t, as in “unfriend.” The Chicago Manual of Style and the Associated Press Stylebook list prefixes alphabetically with specific rules for each.

The styles don’t agree on every prefix. But there’s a common theme: If a prefix or suffix looks weird without a hyphen, go ahead and add one. You don’t have to check a style guide to know that unAmerican, preCivil War, post1950, exwife and antiintuitive are not the way to go.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.