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I work in a school, the school runs a number of clubs. These clubs are booked online during a booking window of around two weeks. I am trying to write a sign to let parents know that the booking window will close at a certain time but am struggling with the exact grammar. To clarify there are multiple clubs, each club will have multiple bookings and each parent may make multiple bookings at multiple clubs.

Should it be (and why):

Club booking closes tonight at 10pm

Clubs booking closes tonight at 10pm

Club bookings close tonight at 10pm

Clubs bookings close tonight at 10pm

Alex
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    There are no overarching rules for [attributive noun + head noun] strings, but the attributive noun is rarely other than singular in form, and the head noun usually inflects normally. Thus 'football manager'; 'football managers'. With 'booking' there is the complication that the noun has a non-count usage (never with the -s). So 'Club bookings close' and 'Club booking closes' are both acceptable. As these might just engender a 'But does that include all clubs? The Gobstones Club?' quandry among some parents, 'Booking for all clubs closes at 10pm tonight' might be safer. (the non-count usage) – Edwin Ashworth May 14 '20 at 15:09
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    Does this answer your question? When are attributive nouns plural? – Edwin Ashworth May 14 '20 at 15:12

1 Answers1

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In this context, club is an attributive noun, which should appear in its base case. You lose the information about whether you have one or many clubs. This can be inferred from the context or reinserted explicitly.

Club modifies booking. You have a certain kind of booking; each one is called a club booking. Since you have multiple of these, you use the plural, bookings.

Putting this together, you’d call them club bookings:

  • Club bookings close tonight at 10pm.

If you want to note that you have more than one club, you can use the phrase “bookings for all clubs”, which preserves the plurality of both clubs and bookings.

Lawrence
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