Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about English grammar and usage — most of which I promptly forgot. And not for lack of use. Every day I apply what I’ve learned to catch and fix writers’ mistakes.

The word ‘plural’ comes from the Old French ‘plurel’ which means ‘more than one’. A noun is a word used to identify something.There are a lot of nouns.There are many patterns to look out for when you ...

Could it be that these are animals that were hunted, fished, or herded and that there was a convention that used the singular as a sort of generic plural when going after these creatures for sport or ...

Let's talk about the plurals of compound nouns. I submit to you: passers-by, hangers-on, attorneys general, brothers-in-law, and culs-de-sac. What about "month end" how would that be pluralized?

Suds is a strange one. Usually a word for a mass of stuff made of of teeny, tiny individuated parts will be a mass noun. For example, the words rice, sand, sugar, and salt are all mass nouns. Mass ...

Sometimes a noun looks like it should be plural when it isn’t. Chances are that this noun is called a mass noun. Mass nouns are nouns that, by their very nature, are plural. These are also called ...

Every answer is the name of a famous person. The person's last name is a plural noun that is part of a category. The clues are the person's first name and the category of the last name. The player ...

A noun is a word used to identify something.There are a lot of nouns.There are many patterns to look out for when you turn a noun into a plural noun.Let’s look at a few of these patterns. In some ...