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in BOS-2 under hyphens... both under adjectives and nouns.
Under adjectives it gives the example of ''The patient is a 36-year-old.''
It doesn't give -year-old under the noun section of hyphens, but does state things like son-in-law, etc. I believe it is in Gregg's where it states that xx-year-old is used as a noun.
I can't think of any instance off the top of my head that 46-year-old wouldn't be hyphenated, but in all my years of writing and transcribing, I don't think I've ever seen it used other than as I've previously posted.
I think as someone else posted, if you can use the words in a hyphenated noun separately and it doesn't change the context, then it doesn't need to be hyphenated... i.e. you couldn't say a 46 came in, a year came in, an old came in... The 46-year-old describes ''the patient,'' which is implied, therefore it is either a 46-year-old patient or a 46-year-old.
Again, I'm not sure if I'm even explaining it correctly, all I know is that basically xx-year-old will have hyphens, but xx years old will not. Simple and a lot easier to remember.
Please let us know if your QKL can document otherwise... and I'm not being mean-spirited, I truly want to know what documention she found this in for my future reference as I've never seen any. Thank you. |
Tell her to check...sm - Check again
