Would you support these? Please, again, no recasts. I want to ensure that I have acquired a solid foundation with regard to spelled-out numbers used as compound modifiers. Fingers crossed! I hope that you support every example. Thank you! :)
1. The service manager reported a one hundred dollar cash shortage on register one and a two hundred fifty-five dollar cash shortage on register three.
2. a one hundred thirty-five to one hundred sixty thousand dollar a year business empire
3. a forty-five to fifty billion dollar a year increase in national spending
4. a fifty-five to sixty-five percent a year decrease in slip-and-fall accidents
5. a ten percent a year increase in taxes
6. a two hundred thousand dollar a year position with IBM
(Only the ordinals between twenty-one and ninety-nine are hyphenated; forget about the compound modifiers because we're dealing strictly with numbers, correct?)
And these? No hyphens in the measurements in dialogue or narrative, correct?
Joe said, "Mike was a six foot five inch monster."
She said, "Martha gave birth to a nine pound eleven ounce baby girl!"
I would support these, but it seems like this should go on the thread you started earlier. That's where I commented . Two threads too similar.
my pet peeve is when people write, or even say "one hundred AND..." there's no and!!!
My norms for this are: numerals for number at or over for 100, words for numbers below (e.g. seventy eight). Always use comma separators every three digits.
Decimals: use numerals, e.g. 12.5.
Millions and above: a combination, e.g. 1.2 million.
Currency: use the name, not the symbol, e.g. 1.5 billion dollars.
It depends on your audience!
I'm a UK writer, and in the UK you would always have an "and" - ie one hundred and fifty. One hundred fifty sounds completely alien to me!
I would definitely support the "anything over a hundred" as numerals (as a maximum, I would use lower than 100) as it means that numbers don't read awkwardly for different audiences (ie me and Thuggish). Having read it now, I'd agree with the whole of the rest of Andrewbee's post.
In my company, the policy for report writing is that anything over twelve is written as a number. Some people have different rules but they are usually ten or twenty.
However - I agree completely with your hyphenation if you were spelling out all the numbers.
