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When there are 2 nouns in the sentence continuously. It's hard to determine where to put the 's'. Is there a standard rule anyone can share with us. So that we can be sure next time.

Mallimika
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1 Answers1

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We don't normally pluralize the "counted" noun (lesson, here) when a count + noun element is being used adjectivally before the "main" noun (class, here).

Hence it's a ten lesson class, a ten foot pole, a three cheese pizza,...

I don't want to get bogged down in hyphenation. If you've seen ten-foot poles hyphenated before, by all means copy what you've seen. But when in doubt, just don't use hyphens - they're rarely necessary.

Whether to use class or classes simply depends on whether you're referring to one such class, or several.

FumbleFingers
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  • In case anyone is curious, the proper hyphenation (and more correct grammar) would be "ten-lesson class". When using a compound adjective, the two adjectives are operating as one singular idea and don't make sense on their own, so you hyphenate them. A "ten class" doesn't make sense, nor does a "lesson class", so it's a "ten-lesson class". On the other hand, an "online night class" is not hyphenated, because an "online class" and a "night class" both make perfect sense. And finally, something like a "very hard class" would also not be hyphenated, because "very" is an adverb, not an adjective. – Aos Sidhe Feb 03 '23 at 15:07
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    In case anyone's interested, I *don't agree* that including a hyphen is "correct grammar". That's a *stylistic choice, which is more likely to be taken with some collocations than with others. And as a general principle*, I think that option is chosen less often as time goes by. – FumbleFingers Feb 03 '23 at 15:34
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    On further review, I think you're right. Merriam-Webster says that it's often down to both individual words and the author's preference. I think I was letting my own style leech in. I stand by the logic of whether a hyphen makes sense or not, but concede that it's not necessarily more correct to have one overall. – Aos Sidhe Feb 03 '23 at 15:58
  • I just searched Google Books for "a ten lesson course" (GB doesn't index punctuation marks, so both orthograhies match that search string). I only looked at the first page of results, but 4 were hyphenated, as against 6 that weren't. It would be interesting to see if there's been any significant change over time, but I don't know how to do that with hyphenated text. – FumbleFingers Feb 03 '23 at 16:10