Questions tagged [pluralia-tantum]
A plurale tantum (Latin for "plural only") is a noun that appears only in the plural form and does not have a singular variant for referring to a single object, such as “pants” or “scissors”.
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What type of nouns are 'cattle', 'staff' and 'jeans'?
I was taught that there are four types of nouns:
singular countable: journey, sheep, child
plural countable: journeys, sheep, children
singular uncountable: travel, water, fruit
plural uncountable:...
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"I have two good news for you."
Maybe the same as This is a good news. This is good news, or News for plural, but I found "I have two good news for you." in https://math.stackexchange.com/a/4780391/1230831, making me ...
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Are plural-only and singular-only nouns always uncountable?
As far as I understand, based on the literal meanings of the words "countable" and "uncountable":
A noun is called countable when it can be counted, i.e. can be used with cardinal ...
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three police; four cattle
There is a group of the nouns that have only plural form and don't have an "-s" at the end. I know three words from this group:
people, police and cattle.
As I've already found out, we can ...
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Why do we pluralize "congratulations" when we say it?
I just thought about this today. Normally when something good happened to some friend we would say "congratulations" to them but we make it plural, instead of "congratulation". I ...
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"ones" substitution for plural uncountable nouns
Can you please clear it out if we can replace such nouns as "trousers, scissors" with the word "ones"or should we not? Which answer is correct?
Which jeans are you going to buy?
the most expensive ...
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Why does it have to be 'scissors' and not just 'scissor'?
I'm wondering why I need to say scissors instead of just 'scissor'. Are there any rules about it?
I would think that I only have one scissor, meaning it would be singular and not plural. (That's at ...
user105285
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Questions about nouns that are always plural
Is it correct to ask about nouns that are always plural and denote things that physically consist of two parts (scissors, trousers, binoculars) like this:
What are these?
I'd say that such a ...
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