"a thank you card" hyphen or no? [closed]

Question 1

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Proofreader claiming a hyphen should not be used for "a thank you card" (as in between thank and the pronoun). Are they right? Thanks.

Question 2

Merriam-Webster has it with the hyphen as an item, with some pretty convincing examples of it used ahead of a noun.

thank-you

noun

: a polite expression of one's gratitude

Contributors will be invited to a thank-you gala planned for a future date. — Sam Flemming, AJC.com, 17 June 2026

Just ahead of the Juneteenth public opening of the Obama Presidential Center, former President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama gathered nearly 500 supporters and contributors to the campus for a thank-you celebration on Tuesday. — Chicago Tribune, 17 June 2026

During the dinner that followed, out in the theatre’s sparkling lobby, Hamrick made a thank-you speech from the second-ring balcony, Eva Perón style. — Bob Morris, New Yorker, 15 June 2026

The American Heritage Dictionary also has it as a hyphenated item, and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and Collins Dictionary have specifically thank-you card.

Checking the Corpus of Contemporary American English, we get 29 hits for a thank-you card and 45 hits for the same without the hyphen. Digging into the results though, most of the ones without are from web/blog/movie/tv/spoken sources, while the with produces more hits for magazine/academic/fiction sources.

In the News on the Web corpus it's 358 with and 576 without - lots of respected organizations using the hyphen.

Johnson better send Robert Hur a thank-you card because the special counsel’s report about President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified information is the only thing that kept the embarrassment by the House off the front page for several days. (Washington Examiner)

What we see when we swipe away one algae-concealed recollection after another isn’t so much an interactive poem as it is a thank-you card, one dedicated to all those who simply did the best they could for someone they loved. (LA Times)

Inspired by their love of flowers, the couple say that the appreciation of the public makes it all worth it, and once received a thank-you card through their letter box. (Telegraph)

I'd say using the hyphen is perfectly acceptable.