Dashes when saying year-olds
I have a question about when to use hyphens. For example, do I have a five-year-old dog or a five year-old dog?
Submit Your Comment
©2024 CYCLE Interactive, LLC.
All Rights Reserved.
Your Pain Is Our Pleasure
24-Hour Proofreading Service—We proofread your Google Docs or Microsoft Word files. We hate grammatical errors with a passion. Learn More
Funny; I had the same exact problem just yesterday while writing for another blog.
a bunch of 5-year-olds
or
a bunch of 5-year olds
or
a bunch of 5 year-olds
or
a bunch of 5 year olds
Dyske May-02-2009
0 vote Permalink Report Abuse
It's two hyphens. Five-year-old.
Erin1 May-02-2009
3 votes Permalink Report Abuse
You don't have to use it at all, but it might be easier to read if you do. I prefer to use it.
In a way, the hyphens put the words together to form an adjective.
Like, "Black-and-white cat."
xenomi May-02-2009
2 votes Permalink Report Abuse
From CollinsCobuild:
mykhailo May-03-2009
1 vote Permalink Report Abuse
I say the hyphens are over used here. We are progressing away from Latin, not regressing back.
wesleyabridle May-06-2009
1 vote Permalink Report Abuse
Keep the hyphen. If you didn't have it, there might be some confusion as to how many dogs and how old they are. From dyske's post:
"A bunch of five year-olds" suggests that there are five of them, and they're around the age of one.
Izzy1 May-12-2009
17 votes Permalink Report Abuse
Helps the eye to link them up. The hyphenization of the whole phrase establishes that the whole phrase is the modifier, and it processes a nanosecond or two faster than NO hyphens, which makes the reader do the linking for himself in hindsight. In any case, using only ONE hyphen, in either position, risks changing the meaning, as Izzy notes.
chironsdaughter Jul-06-2009
3 votes Permalink Report Abuse
A five-year-old boy played with a dog that was three years old.
TMH Mar-22-2011
10 votes Permalink Report Abuse
Looking at Dyske's four options, I'd pick the first. The last might be OK but I'd steer clear of the middle two.
Chris B Mar-22-2011
0 vote Permalink Report Abuse
"a bunch of 5 year-olds" seems like there are 5 kids each aged 1 year.
Phil1 May-09-2011
4 votes Permalink Report Abuse
"A bunch of five year-olds" suggests that there are five of them, and they're around the age of one.
Sorry, I disagree. A "bunch" suggests a bunch, meaning that there can't be a bunch of five one-year olds. That would be like saying, I have several five pairs of tickets to the show tonight. Okay, you can rationalize the meaning and try to make sense out of that, but English is not spoken this way. However, adding the second hyphen is important to make it one word, which is another way to think about it. He is a five-year-old boy, not a five-year old boy and not a five year-old boy. It's easier to read too.
Sons of Manarchy Mar-07-2012
6 votes Permalink Report Abuse
"wesleyabridle
I say the hyphens are over used here. We are progressing away from Latin, not regressing back."
What are you talking about? Hyphens were not used in Latin at all. Heck, the Romans did not even use spaces between words! What would they have wanted hyphens for?
And in what sense are we " progressing away from Latin"? Language development is not progressive. (And English did not develop from Latin, not mainly, anyway.)
Anyway, I agree with those who say we need two hyphens: "five-year-olds."
njtt Mar-07-2012
4 votes Permalink Report Abuse