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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.
The term measure word is also sometimes used to refer to numeral classifiers, which are used with count nouns in some languages. For instance, in English no extra word is needed when saying "three people", but in many East Asian languages a numeral classifier is added, just as a measure word is added for uncountable nouns in English. For example:
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.
Some uncountable nouns can be alternatively used as count nouns when meaning "a type of", and the plural means "more than one type of". For example, strength is uncountable in Strength is power , but it can be used as a countable noun to mean an instance of [a kind of] strength, as in My strengths are in physics and chemistry.
Its name can be traced back to the 13th century, deriving from the French "pierre tourques," meaning "Turkish stone," according to the American Gem Society. Royalty over the centuries have been ...
A yearlong HuffPost investigation into the heroin treatment industry.
A collective noun is a word that designates a group of objects or beings regarded as a whole, such as "flock", "team", or "corporation". Although many languages treat collective nouns as singular, in others they may be interpreted as plural.