In this particular case, "makeup" (without the hyphen) is synonymous with "cosmetics" while "make-up" (with the hyphen) is a compound adjective, e.g., "make-up prayer". And "make up" is an action "I want to make up a prayer". Useful actions: - ***Manually edit***. I.e., go through the posts one by one, getting rid of it. When doing this, we should simultaneously polish the content of the post. This is probably the best method, and with [tag:make-up] having 9 questions, it's not too much of a problem to edit them individually (it's on [my to-do list][1]). This is suitable if the tag is only used under 20 or so times, otherwise it's too disruptive (and might be worth an individual meta post). - ***Synonymize***. Make the tag a synonym of the tag which it is most frequently used as a synonym of. (And manually fix the others.) E.g. https://islam.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1883. This also prevents future attempts to use the tag, since it will be replaced by it's "master" tag. This method is currently largely dysfunctional (due to lack of active and sufficiently high-reputation users), except with diamond moderator intervention. - ***Edit the tag wiki excerpt***. We can (and should) add descriptions as to how tags should be used, along with identifying appropriate alternative tags, to their [tag wiki excerpts][5]: > Provide basic guidance on when to use the tag. In other words, what kinds of questions should have this tag? Very few tags have appropriate tag wiki excerpts currently. [tag:woman] has a reasonable tag wiki excerpt: "Questions about or that apply specifically to women." Probably-more-trouble-than-they're-worth actions: - ***Burninate*** the tag, i.e., remove the tag from all posts. See https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/239190 and https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/120640 This is useful for widely used meta tags (like "homework"). It seems this needs StackExchange moderators. (The word "burninate" also seems to be used to mean "manually edit" above.) - ***Blacklist*** the tag. Then the software will refuse to add that tag to questions. This is probably more appropriate for meta tags (see [The Death of Meta Tags][3]) which come up frequently, but which are useless. It seems this needs StackExchange moderators (see [meta.SE][4]). An alert community should be able to quickly remove a previously removed tag if it comes back. So these things should be unnecessary. [1]: https://islam.meta.stackexchange.com/q/1848/17163 [2]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/239191/351283 [3]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2010/08/07/the-death-of-meta-tags/ [4]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/a/239192/351283 [5]: https://islam.stackexchange.com/help/tag-excerpts