hyphen vs hyphenate

hyphen

noun
  • Someone who belongs to a marginalized subgroup, and can therefore described by a hyphenated term, such as "German-American", "female-academic", etc. 

  • An enclosed walkway or passage that connects two buildings. 

  • The symbol "‐", typically used to join two or more words to form a compound term, or to indicate that a word has been split at the end of a line. 

  • Something that links two more consequential things. 

conj
  • Used to emphasize the coordinating function usually indicated by the punctuation "-". 

hyphenate

noun
  • A person whose ethnicity is a multi-word hyphenated term, such as "African-American". 

  • A person or object with multiple duties, abilities or characteristics, such as "writer-director", "actor-model", or "singer-songwriter". 

verb
  • to join words or syllables with a hyphen. 

  • to break a word at the end of a line according to the hyphenation rules by adding a hyphen on the end of the line. 

How often have the words hyphen and hyphenate occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )