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:

    “The House of Commons starts its proceedings with a prayer. The chaplain looks at the assembled members with their varied intelligence and then prays for the country.”
    —Lord Denning (b. 1899)

    “You can’t write about people out of textbooks, and you can’t use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.”
    —Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)