Headstone inscription. Calling all pedants.

[clam]

DH and SIL want to write "much loved" on it. Should there be a hyphen or not? They reckon none of the other headstones up at the cemetery have hyphens but, having seen some of them, I don't reckon that's a reliable guide.

no hyphen

I think the guardian style guide says with hyphen:

www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/page/0,,184838,00.html

But given the complete lack of ambiguity as to the meaning either way, I'd say it's a matter of taste.

So, which is more tasteful?!

Context ...?

"much-loved" has to be followed by a noun, otherwise it will look weird: "much-loved wife of ..."

"much loved" needn't be: "XXXX - much loved, much missed"

If I had to choose, I'd go for no hyphen, but more for aesthetic reasons (it would look less "fussy") than anything else.

Bink is right

Context: "Much loved mother etc.."

Need to hyphenate much-loved mother, but not my mother was much loved.

Libra is correct.

My initial "no hyphen" was because much is adverb of loved but if it's "much-loved mother" it's hyphenated as adjective of mother.... but then what about dearly departed as opposed to dearly-departed? unless she was spendthrift...

No hyphen if the first word ends with a y. According to the style guide for the bank at which I work, anyway.

Never heard that one before, ninedragons, and I write and edit for a living! Do they give any explanation?

No, but they're very big on "that's the way it's always been done". It probably stems from what some Swiss guy's English governess said in 1834.

Now I think about it, it's probably so the savant derivatives traders don't get confused about adverbs. They have done nothing but maths since they were 14 and it's just easier to give them a rule about words that end in y than short-circuit their brains by explaining the concept of adverbs.

I'd say no hyphen for the reason that when choosing an inscription for a headstone you'd want to keep it as simple as possible, if you look at headstones there is little punctuation- I'd only use punctuation if totally necessary to make the inscription make sense, so in this instance no hyphen needed.