I don't believe that, in Britain at least, the question of which
compounds are written hyphenated is as well-defined as this suggests.
There are habits and tendencies, not definite rules. Furthermore,
something which is normally written separate in one context will often
be hyphenated in another context. So "The cover was bright blue" would
look odd to me with a hyphen, but "a bright-blue cover" would not --
complex pre-nominal modifiers are often hyphenated to make the grammar
clearer to the reader.
Geoffrey Sampson
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Prof. Geoffrey Sampson MA PhD MBCS CITP ILTM
author of "The 'Language Instinct' Debate"
Department of Informatics, University of Sussex
Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, England
www.grsampson.net +44 1273 678525
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