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I would have written "health-product industry", but Googling makes "health product industry" seem more common. I thought that if we created a compound adjective ("health-product" describing "industry"), we should hyphenate. But I also see stuff like "sports equipment industry", unhyphenated.

Should I be hyphenating here?

Sammaron
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  • I don't think so -- that seems to be a general rule, focusing on prefixes being prepended, but this specific example didn't seem to be clarified with that link. – Sammaron Jun 17 '22 at 21:27
  • With individual cases, which may buck trends, the obvious way to go is to research using ngrams or raw Google data. But I don't think a reasonable person is going to find fault with either health-product industry or health product industry. The 'rules' are rules of thumb anyway, the hyphen here is not needed to disambiguate say, and the modern move is to minimise hyphen usage. – Edwin Ashworth Jun 17 '22 at 22:18

2 Answers2

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Pluralise products and lose the hyphen...

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(The hyphenated version doesn't occur often enough to show on the chart.)

FumbleFingers
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You are correct that some writing guides advise hyphenation to clarify compound adjectives. That said, the hyphenation is often a guideline rather than a required practice, since in many cases the resulting phrase (health product industry, electric power industry) won't be misread.

For instance, APA acknowledges that many compounds don't need to be hyphenated:

In a temporary compound that is used as an adjective before a noun, use a hyphen if the term can be misread or if the term expresses a single thought (i.e., all words together modify the noun).

A temporary compound might be a nonce-formation used for a specific statement. In that case, the hyphenation would aid in preventing misreading:

  • two-parent homes (distinguishes from two parent homes, that is, two homes)

However, since "health product" and "sports equipment" are well-known compounds, hyphenating them is not necessary.

TaliesinMerlin
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