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The majority of patients whish to be given every information about their disease and treatments. Source

Apart the correctness of "whish", which clearly seems wrongly spelled, is it grammatical to use "every information" there?

I ask because elsewhere I read that we don't use "every" with uncountable nouns and, at least to me, "information" seems uncountable in that context; but I might be wrong.

In the same place that I called "elsewhere" before, I read that we should use "all the information" rather than "every information". Is this right? And how about using "each" in place of "every" in the sentence above?

2 Answers 2

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You are right. The sentence needs to be rewritten as something like:

Most patients want to have as much information as possible about their diseases and how they are to be treated.

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Every is used also to mean "all possible," such as in the following sentences:

We wish you every success.

He had every reason to be angry.

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  • kiam, do you imagine why "each" seems wrong in "We wish you each success", but, at least to my Italian ear, seems correct in the question piece "... each information ..."?
    – user114
    Commented Mar 24, 2013 at 20:13
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    Both success and reason can be used as uncountable abstract nouns or as countable concrete nouns. In this case, both success and reason are countable, so your examples are grammatical. Information used to have a similar countable sense, but it was lost about a century ago; it cannot be used in this fashion anymore.
    – user230
    Commented Mar 24, 2013 at 20:16

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