Grammar Girl here. I'm In Jan Fogarty, and today we're talking about troops and spelling bees.

The segment is by Neil Whitman. So Memorial Day is next week when we in the U.S. honor members of the military who've died in the line of duty.

So today I'll answer a question

some readers have had about the word troops. Alicia writes, I have a question about the use of the

word troops to mean individual soldiers. For the longest time when I heard a phrase like,

the president is asking Congress to send 10,000 more troops,

I thought the speaker meant that 10,000 troops of soldiers were being sent.

Then, in my mind, I'd try to calculate how many individual soldiers that would actually mean.

Eventually, I realized that the word troop is being used just to mean individual soldiers, and I wonder

why we don't just say soldiers. Well, Alicia isn't alone. Unfortunately, the plural noun troops

is ambiguous. One of its meanings is indeed a group of soldiers. The Random House Dictionary defines

troop as an armored cavalry or cavalry unit

consisting of two or more platoons and a headquarters group. The American Heritage Dictionary

defines it as a unit of cavalry, armored vehicles or artillery in a European army corresponding

to a platoon in the U.S. Army. Now, under those definitions,

two troops could be upwards of several dozen people. The grammatical term for this kind of word,

by the way, is a collective noun. Other collective nouns include family and group. However, when a news report mentions

some number of troops, it's almost certainly talking about that many service members.

In other words, troops is being used as a non-collective noun. So how did the word troops come

to have this ambiguity, and is it okay

to use it this way? Well, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, Troop entered the language

in the mid-1500s, and you can find many early examples of it referring to units of Calvary,

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