Plural nouns

and test yourself with my quiz

Photo by Lensabl on Unsplash

Hello!

True or false? There are two kinds of nouns: countable and uncountable.

What do you think?

I’m sure you’re very familiar with countable and uncountable nouns. Most learners study this early on when they start learning English and there’s a lot of information online about these two groups.

It might surprise you to know that my opening sentence is false! (Unless you already saw my posts on LinkedIn or Facebook!)

 There’s actually a third group of nouns. These are nouns which are always plural. For example:

• Clothes 🧥👗👕

• Scissors ✂️

• Trousers 👖

• Glasses 👓

• Sunglasses 😎

• Cattle 🐄🐮🐂

• Scales ⚖️

• Thanks 🙏

• Nuptials 🤵👰 (= marriage celebrations)

Plural nouns behave like countable nouns in some ways and like uncountable nouns in other ways:

• they can’t be used with numbers (like uncountable nouns)

• they have only one form which is always plural (NOT like countable or uncountable nouns)

• they can’t be used with “a”. Don’t say “a scissor” for example (like uncountable nouns)

• they take the plural form of the verb - “the clothes ARE …” (like a plural countable noun)

• they can be used with “many” - “how many clothes …?” (like countable nouns)

Now I’m going to give you a quiz and also some links to useful grammar lessons on my blog. You can decide whether you want to try the quiz first or read the grammar lessons before you try the quiz.

Here’s the quiz:

Can you decide if these nouns are countable, uncountable or plural?

1. spaghetti

2. series

3. fruit

4. vegetable

5. news

6. pyjamas

7. socks

8. children

9. congratulations

10. politics

11. sunglasses

12. police

And here are the blog posts:

Plural nouns

Countable and uncountable nouns

In these lessons, you’ll find more examples, more explanations, example sentences and another quiz.

How do you think you got on with the quiz? If you’ve got them all right, you should have four countable, four uncountable and four plural nouns.

Here are the answers.

Countable nouns:

vegetable, series, socks, children

We can say “one vegetable” and “two vegetables”, “one series” and “two series”, “one sock” and “two socks”, “one child” and “two children”, so all of these nouns are countable.

Uncountable nouns:

spaghetti, fruit, news, politics

All of these words take the singular verb. For example, “Spaghetti IS from Italy” and “The news IS depressing”.

“Fruit” is usually uncountable. We say, “Fruit IS good for you” and “How MUCH fruit do you eat?” But it can also be countable when we mean “types of fruit”. For example, “I made a dessert with five fruits.” 

Plural nouns

pyjamas, congratulations, sunglasses, police

You can’t count them but they are always plural and take the plural verb.

Let me know if you found this useful. 

See you next week,

Katie

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