May 19, 2026
by the Purpose Foundation
You may have noticed something lately – or maybe you haven't, which is kind of the point. Across our materials, website, and communications, we've started writing steward ownership instead of steward-ownership. No hyphen. Same idea, same heart, one fewer punctuation mark.
It's a small change. But small changes in language are rarely just about grammar, so we wanted to explain our thinking.
When we first started writing about “steward-ownership”, the hyphen was intentional. We were trying to signal that these two words belonged together – that steward and ownership weren't just sitting next to each other by accident, but forming something new. A concept. A distinct way of thinking about how companies can be owned and governed. The hyphen was a way of saying: these words are load-bearing together. That instinct made sense at the time. When a term is new, punctuation can help orient readers.
The hyphen was also doing something subtler. In a world where ownership tends to feel like a fixed and settled concept, the hyphen did quiet work: it signalled that steward-ownership was not simply a redistribution of ownership, but a different way of thinking about what ownership can be. It invited a second look at the concept itself – at the quality and structure of ownership, and the freedom to shape it in ways that fit a company's purpose and values.
Today, steward ownership is no longer new. It has found its way into international publications, policy discussions, and global conversations, and the everyday language of founders, investors, and field builders around the world. Over the past decade, search interest has grown more than tenfold. The concept is no longer in its niche.
What once needed to be carefully flagged is now increasingly understood. We are having these discussions far more often than we were a decade ago, and with far more people. We feel ready to carry them forward without holding on to the hyphen as a marker – not because the distinction no longer matters, but because we trust it can hold its own without one.
And as a term becomes established, the spelling shifts. Think of email, once e-mail. Or online, once on-line. English hyphenation often follows a natural arc: new compound terms start hyphenated, and over time, as the pairing becomes familiar, the hyphen quietly disappears. So basically this is quite a moment to celebrate for us as this is what we work for day in and day out: help steward-ownership take roots and grow!
We also looked at how others in the field are writing it. Increasingly, across organisations, publications, and conversations we respect, steward ownership – without a hyphen – is the predominant form. Aligning with that usage makes the term more immediately legible to someone encountering it for the first time, rather than signalling that this is a technical compound they need to decode.
This is another reason to share and celebrate: we are constantly embracing our role as stewards of steward ownership globally and help companies and investors across the world to work with the concept themselves. That responsibility includes how we write and talk about it. Language is not static, and neither are we.
Worth noting: steward-owned company keeps its hyphen, and deliberately so. When a compound modifier comes before a noun (as in steward-owned), standard English usage calls for a hyphen to prevent ambiguity. This follows the same logic as employee-owned company alongside employee ownership. The modifier and the standalone term follow different rules – and we actually love how when talking about a steward-owned company, the visible connection is there again.
You'll still find steward-ownership in older articles, reports, and resources – ours and others'. That's not a problem, and we're not asking anyone to retroactively scrub the hyphen from their back catalogue. Language shifts don't work that way, and they shouldn't. The hyphen-era materials are part of the story of how this concept developed.
Going forward, we'll write steward ownership. We'll make sure it becomes the predominantly visible form in new content. And we'll embrace the fact that both spellings exist in the world – as quiet evidence of a field that has been growing long enough to outgrow its own early conventions.
That, in a way, saying ‘good bye‘ to our beloved hyphen is something worth celebrating.
