Template:Ambiguous hyphenation

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Use when a line ends with a hyphen, and it is unclear whether the word should be joined without a hyphen, or kept as a hyphenated word.

Before using the template, make sure to check whether the rest of the text has other uses of this word (and other very closely related words), and if so, whether they are all consistently either hyphenated, or unhyphenated – if this is the case, then this template should not be used, as the hyphenation is not considered ambiguous.

The third parameter should be a hyphen {{ah|||-}} if you think it is more likely the printer would have hyphenated the word if it was not at the end of the line.

Over-use: be careful only to use the template when there is a reasonable amount of uncertainty about the printer's intention – in theory all end-of-line hyphens could be considered ambiguous, but this template should only be used when it is genuinely unclear which spelling was intended.

Usage

If you think it is more likely that the printer would have joined the word without a hyphen, had it not been at the end of a line:

• {{ah|pine|wood}}

produces:

• pinewood

If you think it is more likely that the printer would have joined the word with a hyphen, had it not been at the end of a line:

• {{ah|heart|broken|-}}

produces:

• heart-broken

Broken tooltips

If the tooltip breaks (for example, because of {{ls}}) use the fourth unnamed parameter to override the tooltip message:

• {{ah|watch|hou{{ls}}e|-|watchhouse}}

produces:

• watch-house

Page breaks

If the word is divided by a page break, rather than just a line break, use the |page= parameter; so on the first page:

• {{ah|test|case|page=start}}

which produces, in the Page: namespace:

• test-

And on the second page:

• {{ah|test|case|page=end}}

which produces, in the Page: namespace:

• case

When transcluded, this appears as:

• testcase

See also

• {{Hyphenation inconsistency}} – when a word's hyphenation is not ambiguous, and varies within a text
• {{Hyphenated compound word}} – optional template, when a word that is consistently hyphenated in the rest of the text is divided by a line break
• {{Hyphenated word}} – optional template, when a word that is consistently unhyphenated in the rest of the text is divided by a line break

The above documentation is transcluded from Template:Ambiguous hyphenation/doc. (edit | history)
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