1 I would use a suspended en-dash: I was an advisor to the 14– and 15–year-olds. The choice of open (year old), closed (yearold) or hyphenated (year-old) compounds is often a difficult one. The first guide is to see what others do and whether the compound exists in a dictionary.

Understanding the Context

The word year when pronounced starts with a phonetic sound of e which is a vowel sound making it eligible for being preceded by an. Yet, we tend to write a year. Why? I wonder that should we use mid-year and year-end or to use mid-year and end-year.

Key Insights

What 's diffirent? grammar - Should we use year-end or end-year? - English Language ... When you say "the last year" you think of a row of things and you choose the thing at the end. When you say "the past year" you think that an event has gone by or passed.

Final Thoughts

If I would look at Google N-gram Viewer, I think, that "in the past year" is less common than "last year". I would say it is a variant that can be found occasionally. 'A year' can be any year without any specification. But 'the year' means a particular/specified year or the one which is already mentioned and thereby known. E.g: In a year there are twelve months. (means any year or all years) I was born in the year 2000.

(in that particular year) Grammatically 'a/an' is known as indefinite article and 'the' is definite article. The indefinite article (a/an ... The second and final year gives the impression that you mean one specific year, which was at the same time your second, as well as your final year. For example: In the fifth and last year of the war, the motivation was dwindling.