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A type of gel designed to emulate human skin tissue.

So, is this a "human skin tissue–emulating gel" (en dash)?

Or, is it a "human-skin-tissue-emulating gel" (all hyphens)?

Does anyone know the correct hyphenation of such a term?

Janus Bahs Jacquet
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Robert Astle
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  • Have you ever seen this in print? Assuming the answer is 'yes': Where? What variant was used? Why do you think there may be a better one? – Edwin Ashworth Feb 27 '15 at 15:44
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    That is one ugly amalgamation. I would recast the sentence. – Robusto Feb 27 '15 at 15:45
  • Seems like you want something more along the line of "prosthetic skin". – Hot Licks Feb 27 '15 at 18:18
  • This "ugly amalgamation", as one may wish to call it, came from a scientific paper that I was editing as part of my job as an English Editor for a journal. The author of the paper placed a hyphen between "tissue" and "emulating". However, I thought that "human skin" needed to be linked to the word "tissue" in some way; hence, I thought an en dash should be used instead. The gel is not just emulating any kind of tissue, it is specifically emulating human skin tissue. – Robert Astle Feb 28 '15 at 03:05
  • Or, can one argue that the gel is not just emulating "skin tissue", it is emulating human "skin tissue"? Thus, should we insert a hyphen between "skin" and "tissue" to begin with? – Robert Astle Feb 28 '15 at 03:13
  • So, to begin with, we would have "human" "skin-tissue" "emulating" gel. However, I do not know where to correctly position the hyphen(s) or en dash (were it to exist). – Robert Astle Feb 28 '15 at 03:15
  • Presumably, you can have many kinds of gels that emulate different kinds of tissues. For example, a gel that emulates cell tissue, which would end up hyphenated as "cell tissue"-(en dash)"emulating" gel. Thus, I think in these case, words such as "human" and "animal", which could be added at the front of these expressions, would function as adjectives. Can anyone help me out with this? – Robert Astle Feb 28 '15 at 03:17
  • It seems as though the gel can only be emulating a kind of tissue and not just "tissue" alone, right? – Robert Astle Feb 28 '15 at 03:23
  • Style guides recommend limiting your use of hyphens to where they will improve understanding and remove ambiguity in meaning. (Otherwise, you should leave them out to avoid clutter.) At first glance it looks like only one interpretation would be clear, whereas the others would be absurd. I would go with no hyphens at all. – Canis Lupus Mar 29 '15 at 18:00
  • See also 1, 2, and 3. – Canis Lupus Mar 29 '15 at 18:04
  • I have to agree with Robusto here. I had to read through it a few times before I'd realized that it didn't mean human skin tissue that emulates gel. If your aim is clarity, recast the phrase either as gel emulating human skin tissue or as gel that emulates human skin tissue, or as something else altogether. – Anonym Mar 29 '15 at 18:07

2 Answers2

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You need to figure out the structure of the phrase (or word), then put a hyphen between the most closely connected elements, which will be those that make a unit with each other but with no other element. I think the structure is:

[[human [skin tissue]] emulating] gel

and if that's right, the two most closely connected elements are "skin" and "tissue", so then the hyphenation would be: "human skin-tissue emulating gel".

The reason I think that is the structure for this complicated compound is a series of paraphrases we can make. It's a gel for [human skin-tissue emulating] -- that connects the 4 elements "human", "skin", "tissue", and "emulating", and those are bracketed in the structure I gave.

And, something that is for human skin-tissue emulating is for emulating [human skin-tissue]. And human skin-tissue is the [skin-tissue] of a human.

Greg Lee
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  • You treat emulating as a noun here; I would instinctively treat is as a participle (for a noun, I'd use emulation): it is a gel which emulates human skin tissue. If we simplify the NP to just tissue, I would hyphenate it as tissue-emulating gel (in accordance with the ‘rule’ that object-participle adjectives are generally hyphenated). With the complex NP, the only thing I would change is optionally substituting an en dash for the hyphen. I would possibly (50/50) read human skin-tissue emulating gel as ‘human skin tissue that emulates gel’. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 27 '15 at 21:28
  • @JanusBahsJacquet, how do you arrive at the conclusion that I treated emulating as a noun? I appealed to a paraphrase for emulating human skin-tissue, but there, emulating is a gerund -- not a noun (because it has a direct object). – Greg Lee Feb 27 '15 at 22:43
  • I was going by your first paraphrasing, “a gel for [human skin-tissue emulating]”, which reads like a noun to me, not a gerund, since it is modified by an attributive NP. In your last paragraph, you equate this semantically (if I'm reading you right) with a gerund phrase, but your initial analysis and hyphenation seemed to me to be based on the nominal reading, which to me is a red herring. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 27 '15 at 22:50
  • No, in “a gel for [human skin-tissue emulating]”, the bracketed expression is a compound. There is no modification "by an attributive NP". Compounds don't have modification, and "human skin-tissue" is a noun, not a NP (which you can't have inside a compound). – Greg Lee Feb 27 '15 at 23:06
  • ‘Human skin-tissue’ is not a noun, it is a nested compound. Whether or not you classify a compound within a compound as a noun phrase is a matter of preference. The fact remains, however, that gerunds cannot function as the head of a compound noun. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 27 '15 at 23:10
  • Well, it is a nested compound, but that doesn't mean that 'human skin-tissue' is not a noun. I take the structure to be [N [N human] [N [N skin] [N tissue] ] ] -- that is, a noun formed by compounding the noun "human" with the noun "skin tissue". And how do you know that we don't get gerunds in compounds? It seems evident that we do. – Greg Lee Feb 27 '15 at 23:21
  • It is anything but evident to me. Compound noun heads cannot take direct objects the way gerunds can (rather, the entity that corresponds to the direct object of the verb is the modifier in the compound), and they cannot be modified by adverbs the way gerunds can. I cannot see any way for the head of a compound noun to be a gerund, rather than a verbal noun; if you have examples to the contrary, please do share them. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 27 '15 at 23:33
  • Compounds don't have modification -- I just pointed that out 4 comments to the north -- so of course a gerund in a compound could not be modified by an adverb. For evidence of gerunds in compounds, we have the very case before us. Here's a simpler example: "Eating fish is fun" with a gerund ==> "Fish-eating is fun" with a compound. – Greg Lee Feb 27 '15 at 23:46
  • If the relationship between the head in a compound and the (for lack of a better term) ‘embedded’ constituent is not a type of modification, what exactly would you call it? Every paper that I have ever read about compounding has used the term modifier to describe the non-head constituent in a compound noun (excepting dvandva by some authors who see those as having two heads levelled into a single head). I don't see what your fish-eating example proves—in the compound, eating is obviously a verbal noun, not a gerund. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 28 '15 at 00:06
  • In syntax, following McCawley more or less, a modifier is something which when appended to a phrase of a certain type gives as a result a phrase of that same type. Adjective with N-bar give an N-bar. Adverb with Adj-bar gives Adj-bar. Sentence adverb with sentence gives sentence. And so on. But compounds just don't permit that syntactic modification construct, because they can't contain phrases. Too primitive. The interpretation of compounds may involve modification, but this is syntax, isn't it? (And I can't take responsibility for what you read.) – Greg Lee Feb 28 '15 at 00:58
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You need a hyphen between the words tissue and emulating, but nowhere else.

The reason is that skin is simply an attributive noun to tissue (it functions as a adjective), and human is also an attributive noun. Thus human and skin are just cascading "adjectives" that do not combine into a single unit with tissue, and therefore do not require multiple hyphens.

So the correct way to write your phrase is

human skin tissue-emulating gel

Fred Bailey
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    Since the question explicitly mentions (albeit not in a very clear way) the distinction between hyphens and en dashes, it is worth noting that some style guides allow or require that an en dash be used here, rather than a hyphen (see Chicago Manual of Style 6.80, for an example). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 27 '15 at 16:26
  • Yes, I am following the Chicago Manual of Style. Thus, in "human skin tissue-(en dash)emulating gel", is the en dash helping to form a compound adjective? – Robert Astle Feb 28 '15 at 02:59