Easy to use or Easy-to-use? (Helpful Examples)

This article is going to help you make the phrase “easy to use” easy to use. We’ll teach you whether it’s more than one or two words or whether it is hyphenated. The answers might surprise you.

Easy to use vs. Easy-to-use

“Easy to use” and “easy-to-use” are both correct. You would find that “easy to use” makes the most sense when a noun comes before it or when it acts as a noun. “Easy-to-use” works when it is an adjective, and a noun comes directly after it in writing.

According to Google Ngram Viewer, “easy to use” is more popular than the hyphenated variation. This shows that it’s more likely to come up in most sentences. However, the usage graph proves that both forms are correct.

In The Oxford Dictionary, only “easy-to-use” is defined. This is also shown to be the adjective form when the noun comes directly after it in the sentence.

However, the unhyphenated form does not seem to have a dictionary definition because “easy,” and “use” are already individually defined. As long as you know what they mean, you’ll understand what they mean when they’re put together.

The differences between the two come based on where the noun falls in the sentence. For example, you could end up with two very similar sentences that use “easy to use” slightly differently:

• I found the tutorial really easy to use.
• The easy-to-use tutorial was really good for me.

Both of these sentences imply the same thing. However, “tutorial” comes before “easy to use” in the first sentence, which is why the hyphens are dropped. In the second sentence, “tutorial” comes after, so the hyphens are included.

Easy to use

“Easy to use” works well without hyphenations when it is a noun or an adjective that doesn’t have a noun directly after it. For example, “this guide is easy to use” works well because the noun “guide” comes before the three words that modify it.

You would need to hyphenate the words if the noun came directly after them. We do this to show how the modification works in the adjective form. However, it’s not always like that a word comes after “easy to use,” which is why it’s common to see unhyphenated.

Check out some of these examples if you want to learn more about it:

1. It’s not very easy to use, but I’m sure I’ll figure out a good way to get this done.
2. I don’t think he explained it in a way that shows it’s easy to use. Maybe I’m wrong, though.
3. It’s not as easy to use as you seem to think it is.
4. Why can’t this be easy to use? That’s what I like best about these products.

Easy-to-use

“Easy-to-use” only needs to be hyphenated when it’s written as an adjective and comes before a noun. The noun has to come before “easy-to-use” to show that it’s modifying it in a specific way (i.e. “easy-to-use guide”). This is standard practice in English.

According to the AP Stylebook, hyphens are linkers. We can use them to link multiple words together when they are all required to modify the same adjective. Therefore, it’s AP Style that shows us that “easy-to-use” should always be hyphenated.

If it isn’t, we would end up writing “easy to use guide,” which would mean that “easy” would modify “to,” which would modify “easy,” which would modify “guide.” As you can see, it gets confusing without the hyphen.

Here are some examples that won’t be as confusing:

1. I like this easy-to-use guide. It’s helped me to figure out what’s going on with it.
2. I need an easy-to-use appliance if I’m going to find a way to get this sorted out.
3. This easy-to-use solver is what I’m going to try and use to cheat on the exam.
4. I have an easy-to-use program that might be beneficial fo you!

Is “To-Use” Capitalized In The Word “Easy-To-Use”?

“Easy-to-use” is only hyphenated when it is an adjective. Therefore, we do not need to capitalize any part of it since it is not a proper noun.

The only time when you might feel the need to capitalize the individual parts of the word is when it’s in a title. If you like to capitalize every word in your title, keeping “easy-to-use” in line by capitalizing each part would make sense.