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Should I say "3 half days" or "3 half-days" or "3 half-day"? I mean I want to refer to, for example, the a.m. of Monday, the p.m. of Wednesday, and the a.m. of Friday, together.

RegDwigнt
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qazwsx
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  • Related http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/1366/pluralization-rule-for-five-year-old-children-20-pound-note-10-mile-run –  Oct 08 '12 at 21:12
  • How about 36 hours? Anyway, 'three half days' is accurate (says what it means and means what it says) but probably won't mean much to people until you say 'three of either a morning, for example...' – Mitch Oct 08 '12 at 21:28
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    "36 hours" is not "three half-days". It's equal in terms of the quantity of time, but not the literal meaning. – qazwsx Oct 08 '12 at 21:31
  • Isn't the quantity of time really the literal meaning? If not, you need to give an explanation of the meaning that you want to help us decide. Examples aren't enough. For example, in giving exams, an exam period is either the morning, the afternoon, or the evening (three equal allowable periods). You might understand that, but giving an example of them is not enough. – Mitch Oct 08 '12 at 21:39
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    OP gave a specific example: "the a.m. of Monday, the p.m. of Wednesday, and the a.m. of Friday". I'm assuming those are business hours or classroom hours so it's like saying, "...half of Monday, half of Wednesday and half of Friday" - in other words, 3 half days. – Kristina Lopez Oct 09 '12 at 03:10
  • @Mitch Saying "two cups of wine" is not equivalent to saying "1 pint of wine" in conversations. Do you NOT agree? – qazwsx Oct 09 '12 at 18:28

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You should say:

three half-days

tchrist
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  • Why "three half days" is wrong? – qazwsx Oct 08 '12 at 21:32
  • Because you must use a hyphen in something like “a half-day” or “a quarter-hour”. Otherwise you need to make it longer: half a day, a quarter of an hour. – tchrist Oct 08 '12 at 21:37
  • Why both "half a day" and "a half of a day" sound right but "quarter an hour" doesn't? – qazwsx Oct 09 '12 at 01:28
  • @user1664196 Because you can use “half a something” but not “quarter a something”: half a dozen, half a bushel, half a pound, half a foot, half an hour, half a crown. However, you can run a quarter the distance. – tchrist Oct 09 '12 at 01:44
  • Hyphenating half-day makes it an adjective, "half-day course", for example. "3 half days" is correct. – Kristina Lopez Oct 09 '12 at 03:20
  • @KristinaLopez No, that isn’t so. The OED calls all of these nouns, not adjectives: half-breed, half-brother, half-circle, half-cousin, half-dollar, half-dozen, half-hitch, half-hour, half-life, half-light, half-man, half-measure, half-mile, half-minute, half-moon, half-pay, half-price, half-sister, half-truth, half-wit, half-year — and many more like those. – tchrist Oct 09 '12 at 03:25
  • @tchrist, If followed by a noun, your examples become adjectives: half-wit cousins, half-year semester, half-price sale, etc., right? – Kristina Lopez Oct 09 '12 at 03:40
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    @KristinaLopez No, those are still nouns, just used *attributively. The OED provides the example of “their half-wit uncle” [from the Times], and says that that’s an “attrib.”* noun. The adjective would be half-witted, as in “A half-witted king, every day growing feebler in mind.” [Bancroft]. Noun–noun compounds have always been around in English, but there use has increased in modern times. This is a real headache for people doing natural language processing and computational linguistics on a computer. – tchrist Oct 09 '12 at 03:45
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I think the answer should be "three half-day". For Ex: I have taken three half-day leaves.

We cant't use plural nouns with compound adjectives.

sunny sg
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  • "Leave" isn't a countable noun, so this doesn't work. You could say "Three half-day periods of leave" but that's rather convoluted. The question seems sto be asking for a preference between "three half days of leave", "three half-days of leave" and "three half-day of leave". – David Richerby Aug 24 '15 at 08:04