Search results for 'tag:Numbers tag:Hyphenation' matching tags 'Numbers' and 'Hyphenation'

Re: correct adjectives?

Clive — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 03:21:28 GMT

Hi,

You might like to consider this, for example, where it deals with compound adjectives and hyphenation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_compound

My 'Oxford Companion to the Eglish Language' also has a small but interesting section on hyphens (it notes that their use "has always been variable and unpredictable".)

Personally, I'd say the rules/guidelines are quite loose. As long as you feel the meaning will be clear to the reader, you will be OK, very generally speaking. There are certain compounds that are well-accepted. Other than those, I'd advise you to be a bit more careful about forming and using unusual compound adjectives in your more careful writing. And avoid using huge numbers of compound adjectives, as they tend not to express your meaning very clearly and can thus start to irritate the reader.

Overall, the best advice I can offer you is to read a lot, and you will slowly start to get a feeling for this kind of thing.

Clive

"twenty third" or "twenty-third" hyphenation question

Jyakkudesu — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 03:30:50 GMT

Orthography/punctuation experts,
Do you hyphenate ordinal numbers such as twenty-third, or fifty-sixth, or not?
Thank you in advance.

Re: adverb-(hyphen)-adjective

Yankee — Tue, 22 May 2007 01:27:53 GMT

Hi Philip

If you google "compound adjectives", you should be able to find a number of sources.
Even Wikipedia has a bit of information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_compound
Scroll down to "Compound Hyphenated Adjectives" and then down to the part headed with
"The following compound adjectives are not normally hyphenated:"

Some additional sources are:
http://www.writersrelief.com/July06.html
http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000127.htm
http://www.spawar.navy.mil/sti/publications/pubs/td/1064/td1064f.html
http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/042703.htm

The sites I've found all seem to agree on the matter of hyphenation (none) for an -ly adverb + participial adjective that precede a noun.

Re: a six-pack Sprite

Grammar Geek — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 19:58:37 GMT

Lcwang wrote:
Thanks for reply, Believer. But I thought that adjectives in the form of 'numbers + unit-of-measurement' are to be hyphenated. Such as: a ten-story building. How come the rule doesn't apply here?

For issues about hyphenation, my advice would be to pick a dictionary and use whatever it recommends. I like www.m-w.com so I use the hyphenation (or lack of hyphenation) as shown there. This dictionary has six-pack as hyphenated compound.

Re: Proper Grammar

CalifJim — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 07:20:22 GMT

I'd hyphenate and use the singular for all such number adjectives (including hyphenation with the unit of measure).

a one-hundred-and-ninety-one-dollar tax

CJ

Actually, to be perfectly honest, I'd rephrase it!

Re: Hyphenation

MrPedantic — Sat, 19 Mar 2005 01:02:32 GMT

Hello rd, welcome to EF!

Hyphenation is very personal...But I'd write it as follows:

"...the numbers are staggering: in the mid-nineteenth century, over seventy-five thousand acres of rice were productive in the region, yielding one hundred and sixty million pounds of rice. In 1860, when the total national crop of rice was five million bushels, three and a half million of them were grown in a narrow stretch of land near the South Carolina coast. By 1901, however, only thirty-five thousand acres were being planted."

(Because e.g. seventy-five is really 'seventy and five'; whereas elsewhere, the 'and' is included â 'three and a half million', etc.)

MrP

Hyphenation

rocketdosa — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 16:36:05 GMT

Hello, all. What a great forum! I'm not sure if this is the right spot for this question; if not, let me know.

Here's a paragraph I'm working on, in which all numbers are to be written out. I'm confused about the rule on hyphenation when it comes to quantity and as modifiers. Can anyone help?

The troublesome paragraph:

"...the numbers are staggering: in the mid-nineteenth century, over seventy-five thousand acres of rice were productive in the region, yielding one-hundred-and-sixty million pounds of rice. In 1860, when the total national crop of rice was five million bushels, three-and-a-half million of them were grown in a narrow stretch of land near the South Carolina coast. By 1901, however, only thirty-five-thousand acres were being planted.

I've gone back and forth between inserting and removing the hyphen between "seventy-five" and "thousand" and "and-sixty" and "million".

Any suggestions? I appreciate it.

Paul

Hyphenation

rocketdosa — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 02:25:34 GMT

Here's a paragraph I'm working on, in which all numbers are to be written out. I'm confused about the rule on hyphenation when it comes to quantity and as modifiers. Can anyone help?

The troublesome paragraph:

"...the numbers are staggering: in the mid-nineteenth century, over seventy-five thousand acres of rice were productive in the region, yielding one-hundred-and-sixty million pounds of rice. In 1860, when the total national crop of rice was five million bushels, three-and-a-half million of them were grown in a narrow stretch of land near the South Carolina coast. By 1901, however, only thirty-five-thousand acres were being planted.

I've gone back and forth between inserting and removing the hyphen between "five" and "thousand" and "sixty" and "million".

Paul

Re: Dash useage

Mister Micawber — Tue, 12 Oct 2004 14:08:32 GMT

Sorry to be so long, but I have been looking for a good comprehensive internet source on dashes; all the information seems to be in bits and pieces, and some of it is quite contradictory. Here is a good excerpt, however, from the Get it Write website:

'A number of you have written to ask us to explain the difference between the hyphen, the em dash, and the en dash.

Distinguishing among the Three

The hyphen is the shortest of the three and is used most commonly to combine words (compounds such as "well-being" and "advanced-level," for example) and to separate numbers that are not inclusive (phone numbers and Social Security numbers, for example). On typewriter and computer keyboards, the hyphen appears on the bottom half of the key located on the top row between the "0" and the equals mark (=).

In many instances, correct hyphenation can be a complicated issue. We have addressed it partly in an earlier tip (go to the tip archive on this Web site and find the tip on hyphenated adjectives), and we will discuss it in greater detail in a future tip. Today, however, our focus is on the two kinds of dashes.

Remember, though, that when using the hyphen, the en dash, or the em dash, you should put no space either before or after them. The only exception is with a hanging hyphen (see, for example, the word "nineteenth" in the phrase "nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature"). By definition, a hanging hyphen will have a space after it but not before it.

The em dash is the mark of punctuation most of us think of when we hear the term "dash" in regard to a sentence. It is significantly longer than the hyphen. We use the em dash to create a strong break in the structure of a sentence. Dashes can be used in pairs like parenthesesâthat is, to enclose a word, or a phrase, or a clauseâor they can be used alone to detach one end of a sentence from the main body. Dashes are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex or in one that has a number of commas within it.

When we confuse the em dash with the hyphen, we make a sentence virtually impossible to read. Notice the sentence containing dashes in the preceding paragraph. If we had used a hyphen in place of each dash, it would seem as though we had hyphenated two pairs of words in the sentence: "parentheses-that" and "clause-or," neither pair of which makes any sense.

The en dash is slightly longer than the hyphen but not as long as the em dash. (It is, in fact, the width of a typesetter's letter "N," whereas the em dash is the width of the letter "M"âthus their names.) The en dash means, quite simply, "through." We use it most commonly to indicate inclusive dates and numbers: July 9âAugust 17; pp. 37â59.

Many people were not even aware of the distinction between the en dash and the em dash until the advent of word processors, when software programs enabled us to use marks of punctuation that once had been available only to professional printers.'

For other points, I shall fall back on my own opinions:

Basically, use a dash in a range when you haven't time or space or layout for the words, and don't be inconsistent. That's why 'from A-Z' looks bad. 'Lays between 2 and 4 eggs' must be used, because the dash means 'through', not 'and'. If you want to be clearer for a larger range, add 'inclusive': 'B grades for this test are 72%-87% inclusive' (or 'from 72% to 87% inclusive'!).

'Between 2 and 4 eggs' would mean 2, 3 or 4, merely because it would be silly for it to mean '3' when you could just write '3'. For the dates, which are open to more interpretations, you would have to specify the exceptions of course; but, for instance, various seminars could be held 'between October 8 and 11', meaning on the 8th, 9th, and 11th.

No, as Get it Write says, there is no space before or after, except in the case of the hanging hyphen. I personally, however, leave a space after m dashes because I like the look and the sense better.

Hope this helps.