The standard advice is to avoid hyphens and numbers entirely. It is good advice for a reason, and like most good advice it is stated more absolutely than it deserves.
Why the default is no
Three reasons, and they are all about what happens when the name leaves the screen.
- Saying it out loud gets longer. "Blue dash bird dot com." "Blue bird, the number four, dot com." Every extra instruction is a chance to be typed wrong.
- People forget separators. Told a name once, most people will drop the hyphen and land on someone else's site — very often a competitor's, because the unhyphenated version is the one that got taken first.
- They read as second choice. A hyphen or a trailing number tells everyone the clean version exists and belongs to someone else. Sometimes that is fine. Often it quietly undercuts you.
There is also the practical problem from the handle side: no separator is legal everywhere. Hyphens are refused on Instagram and X, dots are refused on X, and underscores — while the most widely accepted — are the character people most reliably mistype.
When a hyphen is the right call
There are real cases.
- The unhyphenated version spells something else. If joining the words creates an unfortunate reading, the hyphen isn't a compromise, it's the fix — and you should probably reconsider the pairing anyway.
- Two words that genuinely need separating to be read. Long compounds where the join creates a letter collision that stops the eye.
- You are in a market where hyphenated domains are normal. German-language domains are a good example: hyphenation is common and reads as ordinary rather than as a fallback.
- It's a secondary domain redirecting to your main one. Owning the hyphenated variant so it points home is defensive and costs almost nothing.
When a number is the right call
Numbers are more forgiving than hyphens in one specific circumstance: when the number is part of the name rather than appended to it.
- The number carries meaning. A name built around a number that means something in your context reads as intentional, because it is.
- It is a word people already say as a number in that context, so no translation is needed.
- It replaces a word rather than padding one — the number is doing work, not filling a gap.
What doesn't work is a number bolted on because the name was taken. A trailing digit is the most legible signal in naming that the clean version wasn't yours, and everyone reads it correctly.
The test
Say the full name to someone who has never seen it written down, then ask them to type it. If they get it right, the separator is fine. If they ask a question first — "is that one word?", "is there a dash?", "the number or the word?" — the name is costing you something on every introduction, forever.
That question is the whole test. It is cheap to run and it is the only one that reflects how names actually travel.
If you're going to use one, use it consistently
The worst outcome is a hyphen in the domain and no hyphen in the handles, or a number on two platforms and not the others. Whatever you decide, apply it everywhere — including the platforms where the character is legal and you could have gone without it.
A name that is spelled two ways is two names, and neither of them accumulates anything.