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Should the boldfaced phrase in the following have been "three-stripe mark" or "three-striped mark"?

The toy company's designers have been faithful to the original sneaker, with the set replicating the shoe's shell toe shape and serrated three stripes mark.

https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/lego-typewriter-launch-scli-intl/index.html

Apollyon
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  • It's NOT "three-striped mark" because that would mean there's three stripes on the mark, not that the mark itself is three stripes. Also consider "logo" rather than "mark", which feels similar to "stain". – gotube Sep 02 '21 at 14:29
  • How about "three-stripe mark"? – Apollyon Sep 02 '21 at 14:38
  • See my answer below. Also, "mark" doesn't mean "logo" in English, except in limited contexts like "trademark" and the branding of livestock. – gotube Sep 02 '21 at 15:30

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If you're only interested in the grammar of using enumerated nouns as part of an adjective, then this should satisfy: Shouldn't "five minute walk" be "five minutes walk" in this sentence?.

However, if you want to know how to talk about the Adidas logo in particular, then you're asking a question about branding, which is a creative choice, rather than one governed by grammar rules. I couldn't find anything authoritative about how Adidas describes their own logo, and non-authoritative writers use both "three-stripe logo" and "three-stripes logo".

The closest I came to something authoritative is a quote attributed to Adolf Dassler, the founder of Adidas. He is said to have regularly referred to Adidas as "The Three-Stripes Company". By extension, he would probably have referred to the logo as "the three-stripes logo".

However, some of the references to this quote spelled it "the Three Stripes Company" (no hyphen). It could be the writers thought they were cleaning up grammar but were actually misquoting the founder. It could also have been only something he said out loud, rather than in writing, in which case we still don't know how he intended it to be written.

gotube
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