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The sentence is: Her face was displayed on a five-metre square monitor. I want the area to be five square metres. Which is correct (or are they all wrong):

a five-metre square monitor
a five metres square monitor
a five-metre squared monitor

I know I could write 'a monitor with an area of five square metres', but people often use one of the above and I would like to know which is correct and why in terms of grammatical rules.

S. Mitchell
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    I think the least ambiguous version would be a five square metre display, but even then you can bet some people would visualise a display that was five metres on a side (i.e. - *twenty-five square metres), so I don't think "correct grammar" is the way to approach this one. Why not do the math yourself and work out the diagonal* measurement of the display, since that's how we usually describe screen sizes today? – FumbleFingers Aug 02 '17 at 14:21
  • I think the problem stems from your hyphenation, which strongly suggests that five relates to a linear measure (which is then squared to give 25 m^2). – Lawrence Aug 02 '17 at 14:27
  • It is a piece of sci-fi and so things like screen ratio are not really relevant. I was wondering whether there was an explanation in terms of compound adjectives or something along those lines. – S. Mitchell Aug 02 '17 at 14:47
  • Arguably in your context it doesn't matter too much whether the reader simply thinks of (at least two) sides being 5 metres, or tries to visualise (in whatever aspect ratio he might expect) a display covering five square metres in total. Perhaps you could use some "quantifier" that was more "familiar, accessible" to the average person, such as a screen as tall as a person. – FumbleFingers Aug 02 '17 at 15:03
  • @BrianDonovan how do you get a length in square units? Surely it's an area? – marcellothearcane Aug 02 '17 at 15:35
  • It seems to me that Laurel has pointed to the answer. I did search the site, but I didn't use the right terms to find this answer. Thank you for all the comments. – S. Mitchell Aug 02 '17 at 20:23

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