Hyphen - Varied Meanings

Varied Meanings

Some strong examples of semantic changes caused by the placement of hyphens:

  • Disease-causing poor nutrition, meaning poor nutrition that causes disease
  • Disease causing poor nutrition, meaning a disease that causes poor nutrition
  • A man-eating shark is a shark that eats humans.
  • A man eating shark is a man who is eating shark meat.
  • A blue-green sea is a sea whose color is somewhere between blue and green.
  • A blue green sea is a contradiction, unless "blue" or "green" are used contextually to mean something other than a color.
  • Three-hundred-year-old trees are an indeterminate number of trees that are 300 years old.
  • Three hundred-year-old trees are three trees that are 100 years old.
  • Three hundred year-old trees are 300 trees that are 1 year old.

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Famous quotes containing the words varied and/or meanings:

    “Yet, hermit and stoic as he was, he was really fond of sympathy, and threw himself heartily and childlike into the company of young people whom he loved, and whom he delighted to entertain, as he only could, with the varied and endless anecdotes of his experiences by field and river: and he was always ready to lead a huckleberry-party or a search for chestnuts and grapes.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.”
    —Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)