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We have recently conducted a reunion party after 50 years. The party was conducted by the old students of a Highschool. We thought of some titles for it:

  1. 50 year Reunion
  2. 50th Reunion
  3. Reunion after 50 years
  4. 50 years Reunion.

I think that the 4th one is grammatically wrong. I feel that the 1st one one means the Reunion lasts for 50 years and the second one means we are meeting for the 50 th year and have met 49 times before The 3rd one means that we are celebrating the Reunion party after 50 years. So according to my thinking, only the 3rd one seems correct to me because we are conducting the Reunion party only after 50 years, and we haven't met before.

Jvlnarasimharao
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    No one will think a reunion lasts for 50 years. The 2nd choice, not the 3rd, means celebrating the reunion for the 50th time. A simple "50-Year Reunion" works, and so does "Reunion 50." – Yosef Baskin Aug 02 '23 at 04:30
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    You shouldn't be "feeling" what these variations mean. Read about ordinal numbers and cardinal numbers. If you're looking for a term for a reunion that has not occurred multiple times in the past (usually annually or every five years), ordinal numbers are not the right choice. #3 is the right choice for that, but it's not a "title"; it's more of a description. – TimR Aug 02 '23 at 10:47
  • The question seems to be about what name to give to the event, rather than how to describe it in a running text. That may be relevant: at least some people would perceive the third option awkward as a name to be used in advertising the event, even if they agree that it is the most precise way of describing it. – jsw29 Aug 03 '23 at 17:42

1 Answers1

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  • [3] is certainly not 'ungrammatical', and could be a headline for an article in the school magazine, but is clunky as a title.

  • [2] is arguably ambiguous, as '50th' can of course mean 'the latest of 50 such ...'. However, pragmatics plays an important role here. 'Jill's 10th birthday party' would almost certainly be understood as 'the party to celebrate Jill's 10th birthday', although 'That's his third birthday party this month!' must of course have the other, [third] [birthday party], sense. But I'd not discount the punchy '50th Reunion' on these grounds unless there are hidebound logicians / pedants who might object. People born on the 29th of February doubtless speak of their 50th birthday, even though 50 isn't a multiple of 4.

  • [1] uses 50 year attributively. And yes, it is far more common to use the singular form, especially with units:

$ a 10-year-old boy

$ a ten-foot barge pole

$ a ten pound hammer

$ a ten cent cigar                             (note the different hyphenation patterns available/normally used)

Plural-form attributives, as Cerberus details in the linked thread, are used especially to disambiguate (a single bar ??), and I'd come down slightly in favour of [4] 50 years Reunion here, as I feel [1] 50 year Reunion suggests more strongly that there is a pattern of such reunions every 50 years.

I don't think a hyphen would add anything of value, and prefer the decluttered version. So definitely no obsolescent apostrophe here, either.

Edwin Ashworth
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  • I think that 10th birthday party unproblematic because it is likely to be 'heard' as 10th-birthday party, rather than 10th birthday-party, and Jill is bound to have had nine birthdays before the tenth, regardless of whether each of them was celebrated by a party. 10th birthday party is therefore not analogous to 50th reunion; it would be analogous to 50th anniversary reunion. – jsw29 Aug 03 '23 at 17:25
  • '50th reunion' is used quite often on the internet where I'd go with '50th anniversary reunion' if I couldn't use '50 years reunion'. – Edwin Ashworth Aug 03 '23 at 18:36