Talk:three-fourths

Tea room discussion

Note: the below discussion was moved from the Wiktionary:Tea room.

Is this an adjective? Same questions for three-quarters. Conrad.Irwin 19:19, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

The both seem like nouns, but SoP nouns: three + - + fourths. I'm less certain about it in "three-fourths part", where it seems like an adjective or some more recent grammatical category. I haven't even looked to see whether there's supposed to be an apostrophe in this last. DCDuring TALK 04:20, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

When hyphenated they are typically used as adjectives. I'd agree that such constructions are SoP in English. However, I think we might want to make an exception and include one-fourth and three-fourths (and the associated "-quarters") as entries because of their extremely high frequency in English relative to all other such fractions. --EncycloPetey 05:18, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Emprically, based on the first 100 visible usages on bgc, "three fourths" is always a noun, as expected. "three-fourths" is used both as adjective and noun. Of the noun usage, "three-fouirths" is more common than "three fourths". High frequency seems like a meaningful consideration, but is not part of WT:CFI. It probably should be. Vote? DCDuring TALK 12:18, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be an adverb too, as in “three-fourths full of water”?

Should we set some arbitrary limit on fractions, or find attributions for each one? Carpenters and mechanics might regularly use thirteen thirty-seconds and twelve one hundreths.

I'd be in favor of using a slight modification the same standards we have for cardinal numerals. That is, allow all one-unit fractions from half to hundredth (half, third, fourth, fifth, .. ninety-ninth, hundredth) and allow their plurals as well. For fractions smaller than hundredth, allow thousandth, millionth, etc. Note that all of these words (except half) will also be ordinal numbers in addition to being fractional numbers. The biggest differences in grammar between the fractions and ordinals are: (1) fractions have common plural forms, whereas the plurals of ordinals are rarely encountered (except "firsts", which is reasonably common), (2) fractions can be used adverbially to modify adjectives (as noted above), in addition to having the ordinal numerical properties of functioning as either a noun or adjective, and functioning adverbially with a verb (He finished second in the race).

I also think we should allow two-thirds and three-fourths / three-quarters, but no other multiples of unit fractions. --EncycloPetey 04:48, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Numeral

Is it not also a numeral, as is two-thirds? --Backinstadiums (talk) 10:19, 29 January 2021 (UTC)

Yes, in fact more common than three fourths per three-fourths of, three fourths of at Google Ngram Viewer. --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:23, 30 October 2022 (UTC)