Editing Hyphen (section)

== History<span class="anchor" id="Origin and history"></span> ==
[[File:Gutenberg bible Old Testament Epistle of St Jerome.jpg|thumb|First page of the first volume: the [[Jerome's epistle to Paulinus (Gutenberg Bible preface)|epistle of St Jerome to Paulinus]] from the University of Texas copy. The page has 40 lines.]]
The first known documentation of the hyphen is in the grammatical works of [[Dionysius Thrax]]. At the time hyphenation was joining two words that would otherwise be read separately by a low [[tie (typography)|tie mark]] between the two words.<ref name="nicky">Nicolas, Nick. "[http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/punctuation.html Greek Unicode Issues: Punctuation] {{webarchive|url=https://archive.today/20120806003722/http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/punctuation.html|date=6 August 2012}}". 2005. Accessed 7 October 2014.</ref> In Greek these marks were known as ''[[enotikon]]'', officially [[romanization of Greek|romanized]] as a hyphen.<ref name="elot">{{lang|el|Ελληνικός Οργανισμός Τυποποίησης}} [''Ellīnikós Organismós Typopoíīsīs'', "[[Hellenic Organization for Standardization]]"]. {{lang|el|ΕΛΟΤ 743, 2η Έκδοση}} [''ELOT 743, 2ī Ekdosī'', "ELOT 743, {{nowrap|2nd ed.}}"]. ELOT (Athens), 2001. {{in lang|el}}</ref>

With the introduction of [[letter spacing]] in the [[Middle Ages]], the hyphen, still written beneath the text, reversed its meaning. Scribes used the mark to connect two words that had been incorrectly separated by a space. This era also saw the introduction of the marginal hyphen, for words broken across lines.<ref name="Houston2013">{{cite book |author=Keith Houston |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3fbWAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA132 |title=Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks |publisher=W.W. Norton & Company |year=2013 |isbn=978-0-393-06442-1 |page=121}}</ref>

The modern format of the hyphen originated with [[Johannes Gutenberg]] of Mainz, Germany, {{circa|lk=no|1455}} with the publication of his 42-line [[Gutenberg Bible|Bible]]. His tools did not allow for a [[wikt:sublinear|sublinear]] hyphen, and he thus moved it to the middle of the line.<ref name="Houston2013b">{{cite book |author=Keith Houston |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3fbWAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA132 |title=Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks |publisher=W.W. Norton & Company |year=2013 |isbn=978-0-393-06442-1 |page=132}}</ref> Examination of an original copy on [[vellum]] (Hubay index #35) in the [[Library of Congress|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 nonprinting 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 [[double hyphen]], <big>{{char|⸗}}</big>, appears throughout the Bible as a short, double line inclined to the right at a 60-degree angle.{{Citation needed|date=September 2021}}