Editing Hyphen (section)

==== Object–verbal-noun compounds ====
{{anchor|Object–verbal noun compounds||reason=Old section name; lots of redirs point here.}}

When an object is compounded with a verbal noun, such as ''[[Mixer (cooking)|egg-beater]]'' (a tool that beats eggs), the result is sometimes hyphenated. Some authors do this consistently, others only for disambiguation; in this case, ''egg-beater, egg beater,'' and ''eggbeater'' are all common.

An example of an ambiguous phrase appears in ''they stood near a group of alien lovers'', which without a hyphen implies that they stood near a group of lovers who were aliens; ''they stood near a group of alien-lovers'' clarifies that they stood near a group of people who loved aliens, as "alien" can be either an adjective or a noun. On the other hand, in the phrase ''a hungry pizza-lover'', the hyphen will often be omitted (a hungry pizza lover), as "pizza" cannot be an adjective and the phrase is therefore unambiguous.

Similarly, ''a man-eating shark'' is nearly the opposite of ''a man eating shark''; the first refers to a shark that eats people, and the second to a man who eats [[shark meat]]. ''A government-monitoring program'' is a program that monitors the government, whereas ''a government monitoring program'' is a government program that monitors something else.