0

"It follows a frantic 24 hours of talks between ambassadors, officials and foreign ministers."

Why is the indefinite article used before the word frantic when 24 hours are undoubtedly plural?

Jakub Málek
  • 29
  • [FumbleFingers] [spent a good two hours](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=spent+a+good+two+hours&year_start=1900&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3) on the Internet, looking for examples of the usage. Obviously I didn't, but syntactically speaking I could have. – FumbleFingers Feb 23 '22 at 11:36

1 Answers1

1

If you say "A frantic period of talks" it might make more sense to you.

So the "24 hours" should be understood as a period of time. A frantic 36 hours or a frantic 10 minutes is similar.

If the hours were all separately frantic it would read something like "24 frantic hours". But there are no concrete rules here.

RedSonja
  • 1,083