I recently wrote “$20 million” in a thread on lottery winnings.
All my life it was my understanding that that’s how you write big, round numbers, e.g.
“Bill, the lucky prick, won $20 million in the Super 7.”
“Dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago.”
“The Earth is approximately 4.6 billion years old.”
However, recently, I have noticed Canadian newspapers suddenly adding a hyphen:
“The Conservatives are proposing to increase defence spending by $5-billion.”
“Tom Cruise was paid $25-million for his latest picture.”
However, this seems to apply only to dollar figures. So it would be “Iginla received a contract that will pay him $22-million.” But then it’s “Canada’s population recently surpassed 33 million.”
My perception is that this hyphen thing is relatively recent, e.g. 10, 15 years. What gives?
The AP Stylebook says “For amounts of more than 1 million, use the and numerals up to two decimal places. Do not link the numerals adn the word by a hyphen.”
First time I’ve seen hyphens used that way, and I didn’t find any American style manuals that call for it. Canadian Press style seems to say no hyphens.
Just to confuse things, a lot of banker types would write $20mm, which is an adaption of Roman numerals. Strangely, when they get into big money, they switch to bn, indicating billion.
The hyphen is an old usage. It all depends on how $20 million is used.
In “He won $20 million,” no hyphen.
In “He won a $20-million prize,” hyphen can be used. This follows the form as if it were spelled out: He won a twenty-million-dollar prize. It’s possible that AP style ignores this, though.
To spell out a little bit what RealityChuck is talking about, the first example is a noun phrase and the second example is an adjectival phrase. Similarly, “He had ice cream,” “He had an ice-cream sundae.”
Note that the hyphenated phrase in the OP functions ass a noun, and thus shouldn’t be hyphenated.
Yes. It’s only hyphenated if it’s a compound adjective: “In an unexpected development Friday, Sunspace won a $20-million lottery prize.” The usage that RickJay quotes is wrong.
It’s not actually an adaption of Roman numerals - rather, it’s replacing strings of three zeroes with an ‘m’ (presumably taken from mille, French for ‘thousand’).
Is that where that usage came from! I see it occasionally, and it drives me crazy, because it looks like someone doesn’t quite know their metric symbols.
Actually, I don’t hyphenate things like “$20 million” as an adjective either. I’d call it what’s known as an open compound and omit the hyphen. (Note #3 under “Compound Adjectives” at that link.) Same for other open compounds such as high school (student) and ice cream (sundae), where there’s no chance of misreading. I do add the hyphen in terms like public-relations firm and critical-thinking skills, where initial misreading is likely.
So, $10mm is ten million dollars? If ‘m’ replaces ‘000’, do you ever write $500m for five hundred thousand dollars or $1mmm for one billion dollars?
The Toronto Sun newspaper often puts 5G for five thousand dollars (five grand) on its front page. Doesn’t seem to happern nearly as often with the other Toronto papers.
Just so long as they don’t write "20 million dollars," with or without the hyphen. It's one of my chief Andy Rooney-level gripes. What do people who write that think the '’ stands for, anyway?
The usage that RickJay quotes is wrong.