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grammatical number - A noun that really does not have a plural



I recently wrote an answer about the verb agreement when using the word "some", and I needed a noun that didn't have a plural. I had a discussion about this with David M, that has been moved to this chat room.


But we didn't really find a noun that absolutely does not have a plural. Do you know a noun that doesn't have a plural?



Answer



Singulars without plurals


Mass nouns (or uncountable nouns) do not represent distinct objects, so the singular and plural semantics do not apply in the same way.


Some examples:


Abstract nouns deceit, information, cunning, and nouns derived from adjectives, such as honesty, wisdom, beauty, intelligence, poverty, stupidity, curiosity, and words ending with "ness", such as goodness, freshness, laziness, and nouns which are homonyms of adjectives with a similar meaning, such as good, bad (can also use goodness and badness), hot, and cold.


In the arts and sciences chemistry, geometry, surgery, the blues,[1] jazz, rock and roll, impressionism, surrealism. This includes those that look plural but function as grammatically singular in English: mathematics (and in British English the shortened form 'maths'), physics, mechanics, dynamics, statics, thermodynamics, aerodynamics, electronics, hydrodynamics, robotics, acoustics, optics, computer graphics, cryptography, ethics, linguistics, etc.; e.g., Mathematics is fun; Cryptography is the science of codes and ciphers; theromodynamics is the science of heat. Data often functions as a singular in terms such as 'data collection' or 'data processing'.


Chemical elements and other physical entities: aluminum (US) / aluminium (UK), copper, gold, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, equipment, furniture, traffic, air and water


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_plurals#Singulars_without_plurals


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