OBS. 7.—­In no part of grammar is usage more unsettled and variable than in that which relates to the figure of words.  It is a point of which modern writers have taken but very little notice.  Lily, and other ancient Latin grammarians, reckoned both species and figure among the grammatical accidents of nearly all the different parts of speech; and accordingly noticed them, in their Etymology, as things worthy to be thus made distinct topics, like numbers, genders, cases, moods, tenses, &c.  But the manner of compounding words in Latin, and also in Greek, is always by consolidation.  No use appears to have been made of the hyphen, in joining the words of those languages, though the name of the mark is a Greek compound, meaning “under one.”  The compounding of words is one principal means of increasing their number; and the arbitrariness with which that is done or neglected in English, is sufficient of itself to make the number of our words a matter of great uncertainty.  Such terms, however, having the advantage of explaining themselves in a much greater degree than others, have little need of definition; and when new things are formed, it is very natural and proper to give them new names of this sort:  as, steamboat, railroad.  The propriety or impropriety of these additions to the language, is not to be determined by dictionaries; for that must be settled by usage before any lexicographer will insert them.  And so numerous, after all, are the discrepancies found in our best dictionaries, that many a word may have its day and grow obsolete, before a nation can learn from them the right way of spelling it; and many a fashionable thing may go entirely out of use, before a man can thus determine how to name it. Railroads are of so recent invention that I find the word in only one dictionary; and that one is wrong, in giving the word a hyphen, while half our printers are wrong, in keeping the words separate because Johnson did not compound them.  But is it not more important, to know whether we ought to write railroad, or rail-road, or rail road, which we cannot learn from any of our dictionaries, than to find out whether we ought to write rocklo, or roquelo, or roquelaur, or roquelaure, which, in some form or other, is found in them all?  The duke of Roquelaure is now forgotten, and his cloak is out of fashion.

OBS. 8.—­No regular phrase, as I have taught in the second rule above, should be needlessly converted into a compound word, either by tacking its parts together with the hyphen, or by uniting them without a hyphen; for, in general, a phrase is one thing, and a word is an other:  and they ought to be kept as distinct as possible.[113] But, when a whole phrase takes the relation of an adjective, the words must be compounded, and the hyphen becomes necessary; as, “An inexpressibly apt bottle-of-small-beer comparison.”—­Peter Pindar.