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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.
Proper nouns that are plural in form take a plural verb in both AmE and BrE; for example, The Beatles are a well-known band; The Diamondbacks are the champions, with one major exception: in American English, the United States is almost universally used with a singular verb.
An example of a plural is the English word boys, which corresponds to the singular boy. Words of other types, such as verbs , adjectives and pronouns , also frequently have distinct plural forms, which are used in agreement with the number of their associated nouns.
This is a list of British English words that have different American English spellings, for example, colour (British English) and color (American English). Word pairs are listed with the British English version first, in italics, followed by the American English version: spelt, spelled; Derived words often, but not always, follow their root.
For example, if "geese" (the plural) became the word for "goose" (the singular) in a future version of English, a word geeses might become the licit plural form. [1] Likewise, "peoples" in English currently means "nations or ethnic groups" but is sometimes used informally as a plural of "person" (eg, "these peoples standing here").
For example, bus is a shortened form of omnibus 'for everyone', the ablative (and dative) plural of omnis, and ignoramus is a verb form, 'we do not know'. Syllabus is a Late Latin (16th c.) word, derived from a misreading of the Greek sittybos "table of contents"; since it is not a classical word, some argue that it does not have a classical ...
Many of these are degenerations in the pronunciation of names that originated in other languages. Sometimes a well-known namesake with the same spelling has a markedly different pronunciation. These are known as heterophonic names or heterophones (unlike heterographs, which are written differently but pronounced the same).
As an example, consider the English sentences below: That apple on the table is fresh. Those two apples on the table are fresh. The quantity of apples is marked on the noun—"apple" singular number (one item) vs. "apples" plural number (more than one item)—on the demonstrative, that/those, and on the verb, is/are.