Hyphen - Origin and History

Origin and History

The first use of the hyphen—and its origination—is often credited to Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany circa 1455 with the publication of his 42-line Bible. Examination of an original copy on vellum (Hubay index #35) in the U. S. Library of Congress shows that Gutenberg's movable type was set justified in a uniform style, 42 equal lines per page.

The Gutenberg printing press required words made up of individual letters of type to be held in place by a surrounding non-printing rigid frame. Gutenberg solved the problem of making each line the same length to fit the frame by inserting a hyphen as the last element at the right side margin. This interrupted the letters in the last word, requiring the remaining letters be carried over to the start of the line below. His hyphen appears throughout the Bible as a short, double line inclined to the right at a 60-degree angle.

In medieval times and the early days of printing, the predecessor of the comma was a slash. As the hyphen ought not to be confused with this, a double-slash was used, this resembling an equals sign tilted like a slash. Writing forms changed with time, and included the full development of the comma, so the hyphen could become one horizontal stroke.

Those dictionaries based on the second edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary used one small, slightly tilted slash for a hyphen which they added at the end of a line where they broke the word, but used a double-slash, much like the very old symbol, to indicate a hyphen that was actually a part of the phrase but just happened to fall at the end of the line. This double-slash would be used in hyphenated phrases in the middle of the text as well, so that there would be no confusion.