Talk:law-enforcement

Hyphenated substantive usage

Can get no explanation for why "law-enforcement" is listed without qualification as a legitimate alternative form for the noun sense. I don't recall ever seeing the term hyphenated in a well-edited source except where it was used as a modifier, although I do sometimes come across the noun form randomly sprinkled with the hyphen in material published by outlets that have been forced to fire their proofreaders. In these cases it appears to result from confusion between the substantive usage (always unhyphenated, I would submit) and the attributive usage (where the hyphen is optional but should be included or omitted consistently by a given publication or author). Mere counterexamples would not necessarily prove that the hyphenated substantive usage is anything but a mistake; is there a stylebook that specifically allows it? --2603:6081:8040:E92C:9D4:9DF3:8587:45E7 00:05, 9 September 2022 (UTC)