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The concept of a "mass noun" is a grammatical concept and is not based on the innate nature of the object to which that noun refers. For example, "seven chairs" and "some furniture" could refer to exactly the same objects, with "seven chairs" referring to them as a collection of individual objects but with "some furniture" referring to them as a single undifferentiated unit.
Number blocks, which can be used for counting. Counting is the process of determining the number of elements of a finite set of objects; that is, determining the size of a set. . The traditional way of counting consists of continually increasing a (mental or spoken) counter by a unit for every element of the set, in some order, while marking (or displacing) those elements to avoid visiting the ...
These words cannot modify a noun without being preceded by an article or numeral (*hundred dogs played in the park), and so are nouns. In East Asia, the higher units are hundred, thousand, myriad 10 4, and powers of myriad. In the Indian subcontinent, they are hundred, thousand, lakh 10 5, crore 10 7, and so on.
Common nouns can be further divided into count and non-count nouns. A count noun can take a number as its determiner (e.g., -20 degrees , zero calories , one cat , two bananas , 276 dollars ). These nouns tend to designate individually identifiable entities, whereas a non-count noun designates a continuum or an undifferentiated mass ( air ...
A proper noun (sometimes called a proper name, though the two terms normally have different meanings) is a noun that represents a unique entity (India, Pegasus, Jupiter, Confucius, Pequod) – as distinguished from common nouns (or appellative nouns), which describe a class of entities (country, animal, planet, person, ship). [11]
Classifiers play a similar role to measure words, except that measure words denote a particular quantity of something (a drop, a cupful, a pint, etc.), rather than the inherent countable units associated with a count noun. Classifiers are used with count nouns; measure words can be used with mass nouns (e.g. "two pints of mud"), and can also be ...
Presumably from the practice, in counting sheep or large herds of cattle, of counting orally from one to twenty, and making a score or notch on a stick, before proceeding to count the next twenty. [3] [4] A distance of twenty yards in ancient archery and gunnery. [5] Threescore: 60 Three score (3x20) Large: 1,000 Slang for one thousand Myriad ...
Thus, the mass noun "water" is quantified as "20 litres of water" while the count noun "chair" is quantified as "20 chairs". However, both mass and count nouns can be quantified in relative terms without unit specification (e.g., "so much water", "so many chairs", though note the different quantifiers "much" and "many").