Editing English plurals (section)

====Singulars without plurals====
{{See also|Singulare tantum}}

[[Mass noun]]s (or uncountable nouns) do not represent distinct objects, so the singular and plural semantics do not apply in the same way. Some examples:
* Abstract nouns: deceit, information, cunning, and nouns derived from adjectives, such as honesty, wisdom, intelligence, poverty, stupidity, curiosity, and words ending with "[[wikt:-ness|-ness]]", such as goodness, freshness, laziness, and nouns which are homonyms of adjectives with a similar meaning, such as good, bad (can also use goodness and badness), hot, and cold.
* In the arts and sciences: chemistry, geometry, surgery, the blues,<ref group="e">Referring to the musical style as a whole.</ref> jazz, rock and roll, impressionism, surrealism. This includes those that look plural but function as grammatically singular in English, e.g., "Mathematics ''is'' fun" and "thermodynamics ''is'' the science of heat": [[mathematics]] (and in British English the shortened form 'maths'), physics, mechanics, dynamics, statics, [[thermodynamics]], [[aerodynamics]], [[electronics]], hydrodynamics, [[robotics]], acoustics, optics, computer graphics, [[ethics]], [[linguistics]], etc.
* Chemical elements and other physical entities: aluminum (U.S.) / aluminium (U.K.), copper, gold, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, equipment, furniture, traffic, air and water

'''Notes:'''
{{Reflist| group="e"|close}}

Some mass nouns can be pluralized, but the meaning in this case may change somewhat. For example, when someone has two ''grains of sand'', they do not have ''two sands'', but ''sand''. However, there could be the many "sands of Africa": either many distinct stretches of sand, or distinct types of sand of interest to [[geologist]]s or builders, or simply the allusive ''[[The Sands of Mars]]''.

It is rare to pluralize ''furniture'' in this way (though it was formerly more common) and ''information'' is never pluralized.

There are several isotopes of oxygen, which might be referred to as different oxygens. In casual speech, ''oxygen'' might be used as shorthand for "an oxygen atom", but in this case, it is not a mass noun, so one can refer to "multiple oxygens in the same molecule".

One would interpret "Bob's ''wisdoms''" as "various pieces of Bob's wisdom" (that is, "don't run with scissors", "defer to those with greater knowledge"), ''deceits'' as a series of instances of deceitful behaviour (lied on income tax, dated my wife), and the different ''idlenesses'' of the worker as plural distinct manifestations of the mass concept of idleness (or as different types of idleness, "bone lazy" versus "no work to do").

The pair ''specie'' and ''species'' both come from a Latin word meaning "kind", but they do not form a singular-plural pair. In Latin, ''specie'' is the [[ablative]] singular form, while ''species'' is the [[nominative]] form, which happens to be the same in both singular and plural. In English, ''species'' behaves similarly—as a noun with identical singular and plural—while ''specie'' is treated as a mass noun, referring to money in the form of coins (the idea is of "[payment] in kind").<ref>{{Cite web
  | last = Harper
  | first = Douglas
  | author-link = Douglas Harper
  | title = Specie
  | work = Online Etymological Dictionary
  | url = http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=specie
  | access-date = 29 August 2010}}</ref>