Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about English grammar and usage — most of which I promptly forgot. And not for lack of use. Every day I apply what I’ve learned to catch and fix writers’ mistakes.
The couple is going to purchase the house? Or the couple are going to purchase the house? Even after all my years of editing, I can still get tripped up trying to make verbs agree with collective ...
Could it be that these are animals that were hunted, fished, or herded and that there was a convention that used the singular as a sort of generic plural when going after these creatures for sport or ...
A noun is a word used to identify something.There are a lot of nouns.There are many patterns to look out for when you turn a noun into a plural noun.Let’s look at a few of these patterns. In some ...
Suds is a strange one. Usually a word for a mass of stuff made of of teeny, tiny individuated parts will be a mass noun. For example, the words rice, sand, sugar, and salt are all mass nouns. Mass ...
Sometimes a noun looks like it should be plural when it isn’t. Chances are that this noun is called a mass noun. Mass nouns are nouns that, by their very nature, are plural. These are also called ...
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...
The word ‘plural’ comes from the Old French ‘plurel’ which means ‘more than one’. A noun is a word used to identify something.There are a lot of nouns.There are many patterns to look out for when you ...
Of all the grammar concepts we have, "plural" seems to be one of the most straightforward. You got one thing? It's singular. Got more than one thing? It's plural. But alas, language is always less ...