Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Correct hyphenation for conjunction of hyphenated compound adjectives



Consider the following sentence:




The labour-intensive and time-intensive part starts tomorrow.





I want to write this without rewriting the word "intensive."



Is this the correct way to do it?




The labour- and time-intensive part starts tomorrow.




Note the hyphen hanging after the word labour. Or should there be no hyphen after labour? Can anyone point me to a reference that talks about this?



Answer



Fowler recommends that you leave out the hyphen after labour there, because it is not strictly needed for comprehension. I don't have a reference on hand, but it is no doubt in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage, a highly respected style book.


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