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Most nouns in English have distinct singular and plural forms. Nouns and most noun phrases can form a possessive construction. Plurality is most commonly shown by the ending-s (or -es), whereas possession is always shown by the enclitic-'s or, for plural forms ending in s, by just an apostrophe. Consider, for example, the forms of the noun girl.
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 ...
Every noun form belongs to a number class (they are partitioned into disjoint classes by number). Noun modifiers (such as adjectives) and verbs may also have different forms for each number subclass and inflect to match the number of the nouns they modify or agree with (number is an agreement category).
Subtraction of natural numbers is not closed: the difference is not a natural number unless the minuend is greater than or equal to the subtrahend. For example, 26 cannot be subtracted from 11 to give a natural number. Such a case uses one of two approaches: Conclude that 26 cannot be subtracted from 11; subtraction becomes a partial function.
English nouns form the largest category of words in English, both in the number of different words and how often they are used in typical texts. The three main categories of English nouns are common nouns, proper nouns, and pronouns. A defining feature of English nouns is their ability to inflect for number, as through the plural –s morpheme.
In mathematics, a negative number is the opposite of a positive real number. [1] Equivalently, a negative number is a real number that is less than zero . Negative numbers are often used to represent the magnitude of a loss or deficiency.
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.
Computable number: A real number whose digits can be computed by some algorithm. Period: A number which can be computed as the integral of some algebraic function over an algebraic domain. Definable number: A real number that can be defined uniquely using a first-order formula with one free variable in the language of set theory.