"bird-dog"

Hi, Argent. NB, Anu rarely reads these threads on the forum. As for compound nouns (and their derived verbs), the convention of hyphenated or not is pretty much arbitrary. Cf. base-ball in the 19th century with baseball today. I'm not sure that a missing or extant hyphen will help much in the determination of a word's part-of-speech-hood (aka lexical category, word class).

Ceci n'est pas un seing.