Is "currently-installed" a proper compound adjective? [duplicate]

I'm in the process of working on technical documentation and the phrase "currently-installed" came up. The context of the orginal sentesnece is as follows:

"You are not licensed to use the currently-installed product."

Normally I see this written as "currently installed" but I was told the other way is correct because it is a compound adjective. Which form is correct?

Solution 1:

From Grammarbook.com's rules about hyphen use:

An often overlooked rule for hyphens: The adverb very and adverbs ending in -ly are not hyphenated.

Incorrect: the very-elegant watch

Incorrect: the finely-tuned watch

This rule applies only to adverbs. The following two sentences are correct because the -ly words are adjectives rather than adverbs:

Correct: the friendly-looking dog

Correct: a family-owned cafe

So because currently is an adverb ending in -ly, the compound adjective currently installed does not need to be hyphenated.

Solution 2:

Linguistically, a compound is a word made up of several words. In common usage, a compound is an expression made up of several words but written with no internal spaces.

Using the second definition, if you write "currently-installed" with a hyphen rather than a space between the words "currently" and "installed", then it's a compound. There is the related question of whether there is a good reason for using the hyphen, and a good reason might be the resolution of a potential ambiguity by grouping together the words of a constituent with the hyphen. This is one of the rules given in the Wikipedia article on English compound -- look under the heading The following compound modifiers are not normally hyphenated. And, by the way, the list given there includes expressions like "currently installed" among those not normally hyphenated.

For the linguist's idea of what a compound is, we'd need some evidence that "currently installed" is a word. I can't imagine what that would be -- it doesn't seem at all like a word, to me. For one thing, it doesn't have the peculiar strong initial stress that many noun compounds have.