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Monday, June 22, 2009

Poll Results 41

This was the question:

What's wrong with this? "The actor is on a two month-long hiatus."

Unneeded hyphen 42 (43%)
Missing hyphen 51 (53%)
Nothing 3 (3%)

Congrats to 53% of you. A hyphen is missing in the compound adjective "two-month-long," which modifies "hiatus." Whenever you join up words to modify something, you use hyphens, as in "The soon-to-be-eaten chocolate looked yummy." If you put the words after the noun, however, then you don't need hyphens: The chocolate that was soon to be eaten looked yummy.

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