For upper right most, I’ve seen it written upper-right most, upper-right-most, and with no hyphens at all.
What makes the most sense to me is upper rightmost, but it’s hard to tell that upper right is the adjective to which most is being applied.
Asked
Active
Viewed 5,086 times
4
-
possible duplicate of Using "non-" to prefix a two-word phrase – tchrist Jul 17 '14 at 16:15
-
4Rightmost is already unhyphenated. There need be no hyphens at all. I.e, upper rightmost is kosher. – John Lawler Jul 17 '14 at 16:21
-
Upper rightmost is not the same as upper-right most, so it may depend on which you mean. – Tim Lymington Jul 17 '14 at 16:23
-
@JohnLawler: That makes a lot of sense; I wish it were clearer to read. – andyvn22 Jul 17 '14 at 16:33
-
Then don't use such small phrases. If you've got a sentence worth of meaning, send a sentence to do it; don't try to pack it into one teensy phrase. – John Lawler Jul 17 '14 at 17:53
1 Answers
4
As John Lawler comments, and as this chart makes clear,...
...rightmost isn't normally hyphenated. And there's no need for one in upper rightmost.
FumbleFingers
- 140,184
- 45
- 294
- 517
-
This is not a valid Google N-Gram: the one for
right-mostis actually using a binary minus to subtract incidences of most from those of right. See here. – tchrist Jul 17 '14 at 16:42 -
@tchrist: I don't think so. It says Replaced right-most with right - most to match how we processed the books. That would be pretty daft if it was just doing arithmetic (which I thought always required brackets anyway). – FumbleFingers Jul 17 '14 at 17:02
-
Then why doesn’t it supply a Google Books link to texts with right-most in them? – tchrist Jul 17 '14 at 17:18
-
@tchrist: I didn't notice any right-most instances in the first 2-3 pages. It only has the non-hyphenated one in the "link to books" lines under the chart. I assume that's because there weren't enough of the hyphenated one, but I don't know much about how NGrams works internally. I trust what the chart is telling me, though. – FumbleFingers Jul 17 '14 at 17:31