In one of the posts, I think Miriam wrote:
"early-evening diners" are people who have dinner early in the evening. "Early-evening " is hyphenated because that's one way of showing that "early" modifies "evening".
"black-and-white sriped woolly hat" and "award-winning album" are similar cases.
I ususally think of the reason why one needs to be hyphenated is that they are to be looked at as one word and the two words that are hyphenated and one functioning as a modifier is something hard to grasp. In the above sentence, is the word "early" acting as an adjective word "evening"? Help me to understand what is being talked about here.