I saw this the other night in an episode of “The Twilight Zone”.
“BEEF STEW TO-DAY” — with a hyphen between “TO” and “DAY” — was on a sign in the background of a scene that was filmed in a cafe.
The hyphenated form of “today” caught my eye.
The SciFi television channel was running a marathon of Twilight Zone episodes, and the logo in the lower-right corner of the TV screen indicated that Twilight Zone started in 1958.
That would date the hyphenated form of “today” to around the late ’50s to early ’60s.
I mentioned the hyphenated form to my wife, and she had the same reaction as I did: “Oh, yeah. That’s right! The word ‘today’ used to be hyphenated, at least on signs.”
I tried to find instances of the hyphenated form “TO-DAY” on Google, but for the life of me I still have not determined how to force Google to include the hyphen in my searches. If you know how to do this, then please let me know!*
I then searched Google for the phrase “hyphenated today” and got a link to one interesting page.
Someone had posted this question at AnswerBag.com: When and why did hyphenated words such as “to-day”, “good-bye”, “to-morrow” and such lose their hyphens?
Here are two salient responses posted at AnswerBag:
- The previous use of hyphens was lilely [sic] an aid to syllabication. Currently, the over-use of hyphens is a crutch for unsure spellers.
- For literal reasons, such as pronounciation [sic].
Bottom line: The word “today” is no longer hyphenated, but I am unsure about the full history of the hyphenated form. The most that I can say is that about fifty years ago it was still being hyphenated on occasion on signs in the USA.
*20090210 Update:
William E. Thompson emailed this tip to me (Thanks, William!):
To search for To-Day on google, I used
“to day” hyphenated
as my search criteria (in fact, that is how I found this page). In many cases, the space character can be used to represent punctuation.
*20110327 Update:
ThatDeborahGirl emailed this note to me (Thanks, Deb!):
It reminded me of “Rilla of Ingleside”, a book in the “Anne of Green Gables” series that I was reading online. I came across a line that hyphenated the word “today”. I wasn’t sure if it was a typo; or that maybe in the original text the word had been hyphenated as a way of diving the word on two lines or, my very first thought, was that maybe the word “today” had once been hyphenated.
As a result of that post, I decided to do some research and figure out, for once and for all, if “today” had once been a hyphenated word.
I came across your post “Beef Stew To-Day” and it confirmed that fact, but you stated that you hadn’t found any other reference for it online. So I thought I’d tell you that the text for this book is online at Project Gutenberg. Anne is agonizing over the WWI and how the women can only wait and worry about their men fighting overseas and her thought is “How the girls of to-day have to suffer” in comparison to her happy childhood at Green Gables.
So, just a bit of trivia, but a bit I thought you’d like to know if you hadn’t found it already.