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More commonly, the singular of the unrelated noun people (from Latin populus) is used as the plural; for example, "two people were living on a one-person salary" (note the plural verb). In its original sense of "populace, ethnic group", people is itself a singular noun with regular plural peoples .
For example, in Spanish, nouns composed of a verb and its plural object usually have the verb first and noun object last (e.g. the legendary monster chupacabras, literally "sucks-goats", or in a more natural English formation "goatsucker") and the plural form of the object noun is retained in both the singular and plural forms of the compound ...
Proper nouns that are plural in form take a plural verb in both AmE and BrE; for example, The Beatles are a well-known band; The Diamondbacks are the champions, with one major exception: in American English, the United States is almost universally used with a singular verb.
Plurals and verb forms almost always follow even though not listed here: "analyses/analyzes", "analysed/analyzed" etc. (but note "analysis" is universal). Some usages identified as American English are common in British English; e.g., disk for disc. A few listed words are more different words than different spellings: "aeroplane/airplane", "mum ...
Words in one class can sometimes be derived from those in another. This has the potential to give rise to new words. For example, the noun aerobics has given rise to the adjective aerobicized. [3] Words combine to form phrases. A phrase typically serves the same function as a word from some particular word class. [3]
For example, bus is a shortened form of omnibus 'for everyone', the ablative (and dative) plural of omnis, and ignoramus is a verb form, 'we do not know'. Syllabus is a Late Latin (16th c.) word, derived from a misreading of the Greek sittybos "table of contents"; since it is not a classical word, some argue that it does not have a classical ...
An example of a plural is the English word boys, which corresponds to the singular boy. Words of other types, such as verbs, adjectives and pronouns, also frequently have distinct plural forms, which are used in agreement with the number of their associated nouns.
Latin has different singular and plural forms for nouns, verbs, and adjectives, in contrast to English where adjectives do not change for number. [10] Tundra Nenets can mark singular and plural on nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and postpositions. [11] However, the most common part of speech to show a number distinction is pronouns.