Kirk Mahoney . com

I saw this the other night in an episode of “The Twilight Zone”.

(Quote) “BEEF STEW TO-DAY” (unquote) — 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 (quote) “hyphenated today” (unquote) 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.