So I was at the airport the other day and I overheard a passenger in front of me in
the queue say. "I have 2 luggages to put on the plane". Now let me ask you a question
is that correct 2 luggages?
No it isn't Luggage is an uncountable noun and so is baggage.
There are some English nouns that don't have a plural so we need to use another word to
count them. It sounds confusing but it's really quite straightforward. To find out how stay tuned
Hello and welcome to LetThemTalk the channel that goes deeper into everything about the
English language. And what I wanted to talk to you about today is English nouns without
a plural. Yes, it would be nice if you could just put an -s- at the end of the word and
then forget about it and go and do something else more interesting. Unfortunately, it's
not so quite so simple today I thought I'd share with you some of these words and show
you how to make them into a plural. So the first word is INFORMATION
Yes, it has no plural. I teach English in France and I hear students saying INFORMATIONS
every day but it's not correct. Instead just place. "a piece of" before INFORMATION
when you want to count it. "I heard an interesting piece of information today". "I have two pieces
of information for you". Let's look at the word NEWS
And NEWS like all the words on this list is always singular (even though NEWS ends an
S") "The news is good". And again you count it with PIECES or with ITEMS.
"I have two items of news to discuss." Luggage or baggage - Again you can count with
PIECES of ITEMS. "You can carry 2 items of hand luggage onto the plane". you can count
suitcases and bags but not luggage you only count pieces of luggage.
RESEARCH - "this was a piece of research that won the scientists the Nobel prize"
EQUIPMENT- for example "check every piece of equipment is working before you start the
experiment. " ADVICE "You're learning English I've got 2
pieces of advice for you". yes, you cannot say "an advice" it's always "a piece of advice".
Remember that for all these words you can say "some" which can precede countable or
uncountable nouns so "some advice", "some information" "some news" etc is ok.
I'll just give you another example. FURNITURE - you can't count furniture you can count
tables and chairs you can't count furniture again you have to say "a piece of furniture"
or "an item of furniture" And HOMEWORK is another example "a piece of
homework", EVIDENCE "a piece of evidence". But sometimes we don't use "piece" or "item"
we use another word so let's look at some of these
we have TROUSERS and SCISSORS "a pair of trousers" / "a pair of scissors".
MONEY is uncountable. You can count coins, you can count pounds you can count euros,
you can count dollars but money is uncountable. BREAD is uncountable you can't have "a bread"
you have "a loaf of bread" the plural is "loaves of bread". So next time you go to a bakery
ask for a loaf of bread LUCK has no plural. You say a stroke of luck.
"Winning the lottery was a stroke of luck". SALT - a grain or a pinch of salt, "I sprinkled
a few grains of salt on my salad". a SPECK of dust. ok so dust is counted with
"specks". "Clean the room and when I get back I don't want to see a speck of dust"
And perhaps my favourite "a DOLLOP" of jam or cream. "For breakfast I have a slice of
crusty bread with a dollop of strawberry jam". I love the word dollop. If you learn one word
today learn the word DOLLOP. In fact there are more quite a lot more or
these words that make non-plural words into plurals so I'll leave a link in the description
with a list. Well there you are I hope you found that useful and thank you for watching,
more English language videos coming soon.