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The plural may be used to emphasise the plurality of the attribute, especially in British English but very rarely in American English: a careers advisor, a languages expert. The plural is also more common with irregular plurals for various attributions: women killers are women who kill, whereas woman killers are those who kill women.
In British English (BrE), collective nouns can take either singular (formal agreement) or plural (notional agreement) verb forms, according to whether the emphasis is on the body as a whole or on the individual members respectively; compare a committee was appointed with the committee were unable to agree.
The plural of the noun bus is usually buses, with busses a minor American variant. [75] Conversely, inflections of the verb bus usually double the s in British usage (busses, bussed, bussing) but not American usage (buses, bused, busing). [75] In Australia, both are common, with the American usage slightly more common. [76]
Plurals and verb forms almost always follow even though not listed here: "analyses/analyzes", "analysed/analyzed" etc. (but note "analysis" is universal). Some usages identified as American English are common in British English; e.g., disk for disc.
The plural (sometimes abbreviated as pl., pl, or PL), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number.
It is grammatically plural, and was historically used only for the dative case, but in most [citation needed] modern dialects is used for all cases and numbers. History Further information: Middle English personal pronouns , Old English pronouns , Proto-Germanic pronouns , and Proto-Indo-European pronouns
By late Middle English, the dual form was lost, and the dative and accusative had merged. [5]: 117 The ours genitive can be seen as early as the 12th century.Ourselves replaced original construction we selfe, us selfum in the 15th century, [6] so that, by the century's end, the Middle English forms of we had solidified into those we use today.
The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected.As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as ...