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Yellowstarstruck Posted 7 years ago
Grammar

Hyphens

Hi! What is the purpose of the hyphens? Thanks, Fulvio

1. in 2014, a seventeen – year – old girl won the Noble Peace Prize.

  

Top answer

yellowstarstruck seventeen – year – old girl That's not the proper way to write hyphens. With hyphens you don't leave spaces. It's "seventeen-year-old girl".

  • yellowstarstruck seventeen – year – old girl That's not the proper way to write hyphens.
  • With hyphens you don't leave spaces.
  • It's "seventeen-year-old girl".
  • The purpose here is to keep all the words together that are part of the compound adjective.
  • Other examples: ready-to-wear clothes; a cold-blooded killer; an open-minded professor The hyphen on most keyboards is just after the numbers across the top: ...
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2 Answers
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yellowstarstruckseventeen – year – old girl

That's not the proper way to write hyphens. With hyphens you don't leave spaces. It's "seventeen-year-old girl".

The purpose here is to keep all the words together that are part of the compound adjective.

Other examples:

ready-to-wear clothes; a cold-blooded killer; an open-minded professor

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There are no spaces around hyphens. A sentence starts with a capital letter.

They are there to make one word out of the three-word adjective to help the reader who otherwise encounters a number, a noun and an adjective: In 2014, a seventeen year old girl won the Noble Peace Prize.

Anyway, it's just the way we write things like that. To do it some other way distracts the reader.

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