Correct usage of (n)fold, where n is any integer greater than or equal to one? [closed]
Writing a rhetorical piece for my high school english class, I wanted to emphasize the sheer increase from 10 million to approximately 2 billion.
Conveniently, 10 million is 200 times smaller than 2 billion. That makes a nice, clean number to work with, even though it really doesn't have any significance on the quesiton I'm asking here.
What I wanted to do is to say something like this:
two hundredfold
or
two hundred-fold
Just as
twofold
means two times as many. The pattern appears to be placing the number before fold
like threefold
, fourfold
, fivefold
, etc.
Yet, with something like two hundred, how should I space, hyphenate and spell it correctly?
Just wondering because I'm a little ocd about this and would like to get it right.
@Mike's answer is simply wrong. Firstly because hundredfold is not a noun, it's an adjective/adverb, and secondly because the correct form for two of them is two hundredfold, for which there are over 1700 written instances in that link (and not a single one for the pluralised version).
Note that in principle the -fold suffix can be attached to any number term, and it's irrelevant if that term includes spaces, as in two hundred. I don't think anyone would ever write one hundred and forty-fourfold, but it would be valid.
But it's worth noting that hundredsfold is valid, because although it's imprecise, hundreds is a valid number term.
"Two hundredfolds" is not correct, and "hundredfold" is not a noun. From NOAD:
-fold |fəʊld|
suffix
forming adjectives and adverbs from cardinal numbers:
1 in an amount multiplied by: threefold.
2 consisting of so many parts or facets: twofold.
For example, in the film The Big Lebowski, the big Lebowski tells The Dude:
And with Brandt as my witness, tell you this: Any further harm visited upon Bunny, shall be visited tenfold upon your head.
So words using "hundredfold" follow the same pattern.