Collective nouns and the nouns they describe can be either singular or plural.

Plural collectives describing singular nouns

The words in bold italic font below are a curiously troublesome type of collective noun and usually, when they are plural, the nouns that follow them (and ‘of’)  should not also be plural because this leads to double (and superfluous) pluralisation:

types of construction
kinds of bird
sorts of pottery
classes of vehicle
species of insect
categories of athlete/swimmer/dancer/book

Plural nouns describing singular or plural nouns

The following bold italic words are not collectives and so the rule above would usually not apply to them. The context is more likely to determine whether the noun following them is singular or plural.

styles of heading
platters of biscuits
groups of statements

The plural ‘styles of heading’ was chosen because ‘styles’ is a borderline collective in the example above: to write ‘styles of headings’ would be overkill, unnecessarily doubling the plural forms. ‘Platters of biscuits’ (whether the biscuits are the same or different) would be correct, because ‘biscuits’ here is a count noun, not a mass noun (and ‘platters of biscuit’ could be construed as the platters themselves being made of biscuit). Similarly, it is ‘groups of statements’, not ‘groups of statement’, because ‘statements’ is a count noun and ‘groups’ is not, strictly speaking, a collective noun.

Perhaps a ‘safer’ construction is to write ‘comments of this sort’, ‘grasses of this type’, ‘feelings of that kind’ in order to avoid the head-scratching conundrums that these collectives can lead to?

Singular collectives describing plural nouns

Where authors often err is when they use a singular collective followed by a plural noun. This usage is ungrammatical, or even ungrammatical and unidiomatic, especially when they are used in conjunction with an inappropriate demonstrative adjective (this, that, these, those):

this class of vehicles,
this type of grasses
this kind of birds,
these sort of things

Compare these with:

several classes of vehicle
these types of grass
these species of bird
these sorts of thing

Singular collectives describing singular nouns

Uniformly singular expressions are acceptable, of course:

This sort of thing interests me
that kind of behaviour is unacceptable
this type of movement is tiring
cheddar is a kind/type of cheese

Some fake collective nouns for fun

The text of this FAQ was kindly provided by JohnDavid Linnegar in a PEGforum thread entitled ‘Help with what I thought was called a double plural’.  Click to view this discussion on the web.

Published on: Aug 18, 2023 at 20:56

393 words