I am not sure my title fully explains what I mean. I thought this might be an interesting question.

If I had a set of keywords, broken with a dash or 2, will search engines consider the dashed split keyword as maybe a full keyword?

Say I have a site that sort of breaks words down, like the dictionary sites do. So a keyword for that page, might end up in the page, and / or the URL, as broken by dashes.

Key-word = keyword
Co-op-er-at-ive = cooperative
Pho-to-gra-phy = Photography

www.example.com/key-word/
www.example.com/co-op-er-at-ive/
www.example.com/pho-to-gra-phy/

I know search engines will consider a dash (at least Google) as a space, and understand it as multiple words. But in the English language, a dash can also break a word down (at least I think it can, can't it?), so will search engines also take this into consideration? I did a 'little' research, I Googled some words and placed random dashes, and it returned the words I searched for, but this could be considered a typo from the user on Google's search end, so really I am wondering if I can purposely put a dash in a keyword, and have the search engine spiders still catch that keyword as the real word without dashes?

I've done a little Googling and looking here on Stackoverflow, but everything comes down to dashes for multiple words, not really the specific thing I'm trying to figure out.

Hopefully that makes sense, I am not an expert in SEO, yet, but get the basics and have been playing, and this is just really a random question to satisfy my knowledge of playing :P