Ad
related to: when to hyphenate adjectives exercises
Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
Hyphens are used in this way to prevent confusion; without their use, a reader might interpret the words separately, rather than as a phrase. Hyphens join the relevant words into a single idea, a compound adjective. A compound modifier that is spaced rather than hyphenated is referred to as an open compound. [2]
Fractions as modifiers are hyphenated: "two-thirds majority", but if numerator or denominator are already hyphenated, the fraction itself does not take a hyphen: "a thirty-three thousandth part". (Fractions used as nouns have no hyphens: "I ate two thirds of the pie.") Comparatives and superlatives in compound adjectives also take hyphens:
The hyphen ‐ is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. [1]The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes (en dash –, em dash — and others), which are wider, or with the minus sign −, which is also wider and usually drawn a little higher to match the crossbar in the plus sign +.
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
The adjectives good and bad have the irregular forms better, best and worse, worst; also far becomes farther, farthest or further, furthest. The adjective old (for which the regular older and oldest are usual) also has the irregular forms elder and eldest, these generally being restricted to use in comparing siblings and in
Such adjective phrases can be integrated into the clause (e.g., Love dies young) or detached from the clause as a supplement (e.g., Happy to see her, I wept). Adjective phrases functioning as predicative adjuncts are typically interpreted with the subject of the main clause being the predicand of the adjunct (i.e., "I was happy to see her"). [11]
The adjective-like nature of these prepositional phrases is indicated by the tendency for them to be hyphenated in writing and the fact that they can typically be paraphrased with an adjective phrase (compare the endangered postal service). [40] Similarly, adjective-like clauses can function as pre-head modifiers of nouns.
For example, because martial is a postpositive adjective in the phrase court-martial, the plural is courts-martial, the suffix being attached to the noun rather than the adjective. This pattern holds for most postpositive adjectives, with the few exceptions reflecting overriding linguistic processes such as rebracketing.