Why “plural” is being discussed
The most recent Hacker News stories and comments contributing to this topic's mentions.
Again, e.g. Bulgarian uses едни ("ones") as essentially plural indefinite article, and for genuinely plural things too. It's not nearly as pervasive as the English usage (the nu…
by Joker_vD · Sep 20, 2026
My language has male/female/neuter in singular and male-person/everything-else in plural (e.g. singular dog is male and declines like boy, but plural dogs is non-…
by Xirdus · Sep 20, 2026
That's just an oddity due to nominally singular items having plural names. "*a scissors/pants" is correctly "a pair of scissors/pants" and you still use the definite "…
by nutjob2 · Sep 20, 2026
> plural inanimate abstract words ... "feminine" A relic of gendered nouns in English can still be seen in how we treat concepts like countries, churches, schools, organizations…
by cvoss · Sep 20, 2026
I always thought that "some" was technically an article (the plural form of "a"/"an") but I hadn't considered how plurals weren't used in phrases like that. One thing I did…
by saghm · Sep 20, 2026
But he is totally right Spanish is more consistent in that respect, because it has a plural article. You can say "son unos perros" as well when you put that sentence in plural.…
by Al-Khwarizmi · Sep 20, 2026
Interest
Proportion of Hacker News items mentioning "plural" over time.
Mentions
Total number of Hacker News items mentioning "plural" over time.
In many languages, a plural, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun. This default quantity is most commonly one. Therefore, plurals most typically denote two or more of something, although they may also denote fractional, zero or negative amounts. An example of a plural is the English word boys, which corresponds to the singular boy. Read more on Wikipedia