Grammar Girl here.

We've received several requests to address Blatt and Plurals, so today we're going to

tackle a tricky one.

A listener called him with this request.

Yeah, hi, Grammar Girl.

This is Adam from Peoria.

I was just wondering if you could go over the usage of the word data, so in the data

R, correct?

Or the data is correct.

Thanks.

The question seems easy enough, is data singular or plural.

Unfortunately, the answer is that both usages are standard.

However, before we can address this fully, we need to review a couple of linguistic concepts.

Guest writer Charles Carson writes, as you may recall, back in Episode 54, we reviewed

the differences between count nouns and mass nouns.

So we could explain why grocery store signs should read ten items or fewer instead of ten

items or less.

Count nouns are used for objects that can be counted.

It is their distinct objects that can be numbered.

For example, in my refrigerator, there are eggs, apples, and lemons.

These are all count nouns.

Count nouns could be singular or plural, and when you use them as the subject of a sentence,

...