What sentence between those two is valid, using singular or plural with "any kind of" ?
Any kind of car
Or
Any kind of cars
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1Individuals may have different preferences, but there's no universally-observed grammatical principle requiring or preventing any of the four permutations in, for example, He avoids any kind / kinds of fruit / fruits. Note that if you replace any by all you can't use singular kind, but it's still a stylistic choice whether to pluralise fruit in that example context.– FumbleFingersJan 14, 2020 at 14:49
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2Need some more context I think.– puppetsockJan 14, 2020 at 14:57
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2 Answers
The use of kind and car need to match.
Singular:
Any kind of car
Plural
All kinds of cars
my search in "google ngram" about your question showed me that all is right with both of these sentences. But for me they have slightly different meaning from each other.
When you talk about car from range of them, you can use "Any kind of car" and anyway it will be talking inside category of usual cars (if you don't have any specific context with your sentence that can change meaning).
When you talk "Any kind of cars" it can be about different more common categories of different cars (and might suppose attention on these categories in your talking).
Schematically:
1) About any car from one category of cars (like usual cars not specific).
2) About any category from different categories of cars (like sport cars, family cars or so on).
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@J R, I looked ngram not only for [car-cars] case but for different singular-plural like man-men or so on and it came to my answer . And I agree with you, yes, plural is more rare but not so rare as mistake. I suppose so about it. Jan 14, 2020 at 15:34