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I have a question regarding spelling the following phrase: "neutral stability curve" in the meaning of "curve of neutral stability". Should I put a hyphen between "neutral" and "stability" or not?

Is the rule on this different in American and British English?

Thank you!

Dmitry Kabanov
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2 Answers2

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  • Is it a curve that has or expresses neutral stability? If so: "neutral-stability curve".

  • Or is it a stability curve that is neutral? If so: "neutral stability curve".

You say that it is a ""curve of neutral stability", so you would use the first of these - hyphenate.

The point of joining "neutral" and "stability", in "neutral-stability", is to apply the compound adjective of neutral stability to the curve. The point of not joining them is to apply "neutral" to a stability curve, that is, apply "neutral" to the application of "stability" to "curve".

This is a general rule that you can often use to increase clarity. But it is often not followed, and there are no doubt exceptions where it might even reduce clarity. A lot can depend on whether the compound adjective really make sense - e.g., whether there is such a quality as "neutral stability".

Drew
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  • The general rules-of-thumb for hyphenating compound pre-modifiers have been covered before, and you don't address the actual example (which Cathy Gartaganis does). – Edwin Ashworth Apr 08 '16 at 15:47
  • It is neither of those two things. It is a particular thing, not a type of thing. It separates regions of positive and negative stability in fluid dynamics stability analysis. – Phil Sweet Apr 08 '16 at 22:09
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It is a compound noun (no hyphens), usually appearing as the/a neutral stability curve. It is used in naval architecture to depict an aspect of ship stability and also in a few other branches of fluid dynamics to delineate stable regimes of flow from unstable ones.

Direct Numerical Calculations of a Neutral Stability Curve for One-Dimensional Detonations by Wei Cai, Wonho Oh, and Youlan Zhu

A neutral stability curve for incompressible flows in a rectangular driven cavity by A. Abouhamza and R. Pierre

Neutral stability curves for a thermal convection problem Part II. The case of multiple solutions of the characteristic equation by A. Georgescu, I. Oprea

Phil Sweet
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  • Thank you very much, Phil! I didn't think about this as a compound noun! I was thinking about 'neutral stability' as a modifier of 'curve', therefore, was inclined to spell it with a hyphen. However, in the literature they do not put a hyphen there; that's why I've asked my question. – Dmitry Kabanov Apr 09 '16 at 17:00