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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.
Linguistic prescriptivists usually say that fewer and not less should be used with countable nouns, [2] and that less should be used only with uncountable nouns. This distinction was first tentatively suggested by the grammarian Robert Baker in 1770, [3] [1] and it was eventually presented as a rule by many grammarians since then.
In linguistics, a mass noun, uncountable noun, non-count noun, uncount noun, or just uncountable, is a noun with the syntactic property that any quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit, rather than as something with discrete elements. Uncountable nouns are distinguished from count nouns.
When an ordinarily uncountable noun such as wine appears with plural form (several wines), it can be understood as referring to various abstract kinds (for example, varieties of wine). [4] The "universal packager" likewise describes how mass nouns are understood when they are used as countable nouns.
Some nouns can function both as countable and as uncountable such as "wine" in This is a good wine. Countable nouns generally have singular and plural forms. [ 4 ] In most cases the plural is formed from the singular by adding -[e]s (as in dogs , bushes ), although there are also irregular forms ( woman/women , foot/feet ), including cases ...
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 ...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -TikTok must now move quickly with a request to the Supreme Court to block or overturn a law that would require its Chinese parent ByteDance to divest of the short-video app ...
Equipment most commonly refers to a set of tools or other objects commonly used to achieve a particular objective. Different jobs require different kinds of equipment ...