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Although the everyday meaning of plural is "more than one", the grammatical term has a slightly different technical meaning. In the English system of grammatical number, singular means "one (or minus one)", and plural means "not singular". In other words, plural means not just "more than one" but also "less than one (except minus one)".
The collective presents similar issues as the distributive in its potential classification as grammatical number, including the fact that some languages allow both collective and plural markers on the same words. Adding a collective to a plural word does not change the number of referents, only how those referents are conceptualized. [315]
When the prefix "re-" is added to a monosyllabic word, the word gains currency both as a noun and as a verb. Most of the pairs listed below are closely related: for example, "absent" as a noun meaning "missing", and as a verb meaning "to make oneself missing". There are also many cases in which homographs are of an entirely separate origin, or ...
Welsh has two systems of grammatical number, singular–plural and collective–singulative. Since the loss of the noun inflection system of earlier Celtic, plurals have become unpredictable and can be formed in several ways: by adding a suffix to the end of the word (most commonly -au), as in tad "father" and tadau "fathers", through vowel affection, as in bachgen "boy" and bechgyn "boys", or ...
The word "mathematics" may have originally been plural in concept, referring to mathematic endeavors, but metonymic shift (the shift in concept from "the endeavors" to "the whole set of endeavors") produced the usage of "mathematics" as a singular entity taking singular verb forms. (A true mass-noun sense of "mathematics" followed naturally.)
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 ...
The audience measurement of U.S. television has relied on sampling to obtain estimated audience sizes in which advertisers determine the value of such acquisitions. . According to The Television Will Be Revolutionized, Amanda D. Lotz writes that during the 1960s and 1970s, Nielsen introduced the Storage Instantaneous Audimeter, a device that sent daily viewing information to the company's ...