In this sentence, should "often difficult" be hyphenated?
At the arcade the brothers were able to leave behind their often difficult domestic situation.
My gut instinct tells me it should be hyphenated, but "often-difficult" looks odd to me.
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John Knight
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Possible duplicate Should I used a dash for “often-used” and “well-documented”?. – Nigel J May 22 '18 at 20:41
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Yes, it should be hyphenated. If you could post some research, that would prolly resolve your difficulty without further ado. – Robbie Goodwin Jun 01 '18 at 21:56
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A hyphen is rarely used with the word often, but is commonly used with its archaic form oft.
No doubt they are subsequently guided to higher excellence and effectiveness with the experience gained in their oft-repeated performance.
It was in reference to this speech that he made the oft-quoted remark that he "would rather be right than be president."
It is common for oft- to be followed by a past participle, as in the previous examples. More rarely, it is followed by an adjective, as in this example:
The Phoenix Suns got a chance to inhale on Tuesday night, as this year’s oft-anticlimactic but ever-consequential draft lottery went down in Chicago for the first time.
pablopaul
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It seems like your gut may have a leg up on your eyes here. But anatomical-idiomatic punnery aside...
The latest issue of the Chicago Manual of Style (16) has a wonderful, multipage chart on hyphenation (§7.85) that I refer to often for answers to puzzles like this one. For adverb not ending in ly + participle or adjective it gives a Summary of [this] rule:
"Hypenated before but not after a noun; compounds with more, most, less, least, and very usually left open unless ambiguity threatens. When the adverb rather than the compound as a whole is modified by another adverb, the entire expression is open.
The "usually" in ...usually left open... seems to suggest there is some measure of pull away from hyphenation of commonly-compounded adverbials (see what I did there?) among which you might include "often-" (though not named here in Chicago).
The Corpus of Contemporary American English shows this Often compound hyphenated before a noun (with a liberal parameter space of +6) roughly 8 times more frequently than not (~3500:450).
In short, your eyes could probably get away with taking the win, but some readers' guts might look twice.
