1

Most of the employees prefer to eat their lunch/lunches at their desk or desks.

My question is: is it lunch/lunches and desk or desks? Is the word "their" here referring to individual or employees as a group?

Improve this question
1
  • 2
    "Their" can have a distributive meaning, so "Most of the employees prefer to eat their lunch at their desk" is the preferred construction.
    – BillJ
    Dec 28, 2020 at 17:57

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
3

This is a notoriously thorny area. But basically, lunch is preferred in your sentence. For desk / desks, it is less clear, but I prefer desks:

  • Most of the employees prefer to eat their lunch at their desks.

If you try to do a strict grammatical analysis of this sentence, you will run into problems. You have to accept that they/their is in the middle of a prolonged grammatical shift whereby it is coming to take over more singular functions.

There are other factors involved in my choices above: For example, lunch is usually an uncountable noun, whereas desk is countable. To make the whole thing more natural:

  • Most employees prefer to eat lunch at their desk[s].
Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .