You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You signed out in another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You switched accounts on another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.Dismiss alert
Non-native English speakers from all cultures have trouble with mass nouns / uncountable nouns / non-count nouns in English. A little of this may have started to spill over into younger native speakers:
An advice
An evidence
An info/an information
An infrastructure
A luggage
Erroneous pluralizations of these seem to all already be flagged by the spellchecker.
Suggestions could include:
Simply removing the article
Change a/an into "some"
Add a quantifier, usually "item of" or "piece of", but some words have one or more idiomatic ones.
Some of these have one or more other countable nouns with the same meaning that could be suggested: "an advice" -> "a tip", "a suggestion".
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered:
A couple of these have become more acceptable in the programming context, so I suppose they should be optional. They sound wrong to people my age and older who are native speakers, but sound fine to non-native speakers and younger native speakers. I'm not sure if it crossed over in or after the Millennial generation:
I wrote a code → I wrote some code
This is a software → This is a software package
There are probably word-specific replacements. I'll start a list for each:
code / source code
an app
a piece of code
a program
a snippet
a snippet of code
some code
code
software
a piece of software
an app
a program
a software tool
a software package
some software
software
a tool
"Hardware" may fall into the same category. I'll add it if I find concrete examples in the wild. "Firmware" seems to be different in some way and at least has a plural though "I installed a firmware." still sounds wrong where "They're running different firmwares." sounds more acceptable, possibly not 100% acceptable though.
hippietrail
changed the title
Flag indefinite article used before mass nouns (uncountable nouns)
feat: Flag indefinite article used before mass nouns (uncountable nouns)
Jan 31, 2025
Non-native English speakers from all cultures have trouble with mass nouns / uncountable nouns / non-count nouns in English. A little of this may have started to spill over into younger native speakers:
Erroneous pluralizations of these seem to all already be flagged by the spellchecker.
Suggestions could include:
The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: