Learn English – Correct use of hyphen to prefix multiple words with one

grammaticality

I wrote:

An open -source and -society loving person

and had this corrected by a native English speaker to

An open-source-and-society loving person

Which to me changes the meaning of the phrase. The first one is meant to be short-hand for prefixing both "source" and "society" with "open", while the second one does not seem to connect "society" with "open".

Is either of the forms more correct than the other? Should it be written differently all together?

Best Answer

The use of hyphens in my initial sentance is called Suspended hyphens.

From wikipedia:

A suspended hyphen (also referred to as a "hanging hyphen" or "dangling hyphen") may be used when a single base word is used with separate, consecutive, hyphenated words which are connected by "and", "or", or "to". For example, nineteenth-century and twentieth-century may be written as nineteenth- and twentieth-century.

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