Isaiah 8:1 (King James Bible) take thee a great roll and write in it with a man’s pen concerning Maher-shalal-hash-baz
The Hebrew name here in 2 Nephi 18:1 is a sentence meaning ‘quickly the plunder / swiftly the spoil’. As with the name Shear-jashub (discussed under 2 Nephi 17:3), we spell such sentencenames by capitalizing the first letter of only the first word in the name and by separating each word with a hyphen. This particular name occurs twice here in chapter 18. We get similar manuscript variation for its spelling in verse 3:
In the first occurrence (in verse 1), Oliver Cowdery originally wrote each word in the name separately and capitalized the first letter of only the first word (thus Maher shalal hash baz). This spelling corresponds to the way the name is spelled in the Masoretic Hebrew text. Somewhat later, Oliver placed hyphens between the words (the level of ink flow is slightly weaker). For the second occurrence of the name (in verse 3), Oliver originally wrote the name as Mahershalal hash baz. In this case, the first two words were written as one. Again, somewhat later, he placed hyphens between the individual words (the level of ink flow is now slightly heavier). We do not have the original manuscript for these two occurrences, but it appears that for the first occurrence of the name, Joseph Smith must have separately spelled out each word in the name. We cannot be sure whether Joseph himself saw spaces or hyphens between the individual words of the name.
The 1892 RLDS edition spelled the first instance of the name as Mahershalal-hash-baz , but the second as Maher-shalal-hash-baz. This variation is the result of using the 1874 RLDS edition as the copy-text. In that edition, for the first instance of this name, Maher occurred at the end of the line:
great roll, and write in it with a man’s pen concerning Mahershalal-hash-baz. And I took unto me faithful witnesses to
It seems that the 1892 typesetter interpreted the end-of-line hyphen after Maher as a soft hyphen rather than as a hard hyphen (thus we get Mahershalal-hash-baz in the 1892 edition). On the other hand, the second instance of the name was set as follows in the 1874 edition:
a son. Then said the Lord to me, Call his name Maher-shalalhash-baz. For behold, the child shall not have knowledge to
Here the 1892 typesetter recognized that the end-of-line hyphen was a hard hyphen and set it properly, probably because he had been forced to interpret the first hyphen in the name (the one after Maher) as a hard hyphen. Finally, we note that the mishyphenation of the first occurrence has continued in the RLDS text.
Summary: Follow the traditional King James spelling for the name Maher-shalal-hash-baz, with only the first word capitalized and hyphens separating the words.