Data (word)

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The word data is most often used as a singular mass noun in educated everyday usage. [1] [2] However, due to the history and etymology of the word, considerable controversy has existed on whether it should be considered a mass noun used with verbs conjugated in the singular, or should be treated as the plural of the now-rarely-used datum.

Usage in English

In one sense, data is the plural form of datum. Datum actually can also be a count noun with the plural datums (see usage in datum article) that can be used with cardinal numbers (e.g., "80 datums"); data (originally a Latin plural) is not used like a normal count noun with cardinal numbers and can be plural with plural determiners such as these and many, or it can be used as a mass noun with a verb in the singular form. [3] Even when a very small quantity of data is referenced (one number, for example), the phrase piece of data is often used, as opposed to datum. The debate over appropriate usage continues, [4] [5] [6] but "data" as a singular form is far more common. [7]

In English, the word datum is still used in the general sense of "an item given". In cartography, geography, nuclear magnetic resonance and technical drawing, it is often used to refer to a single specific reference datum from which distances to all other data are measured. Any measurement or result is a datum, though data point is now far more common. [8]

Data is indeed most often used as a singular mass noun in educated everyday usage. [9] [10] Some major newspapers, such as The New York Times , use it either in the singular or plural. In The New York Times, the phrases "the survey data are still being analyzed" and "the first year for which data is available" have appeared within one day. [11] The Wall Street Journal explicitly allows this usage in its style guide. [12] The Associated Press style guide classifies data as a collective noun that takes the singular when treated as a unit but the plural when referring to individual items (e.g., "The data is sound" and "The data have been carefully collected"). [13]

In scientific writing, data is often treated as a plural, as in These data do not support the conclusions, but the word is also used as a singular mass entity like information (e.g., in computing and related disciplines). [14] British usage now widely accepts treating data as singular in standard English, [15] including everyday newspaper usage [16] at least in non-scientific use. [17] UK scientific publishing still prefers treating it as a plural. [18] Some UK university style guides recommend using data for both singular and plural use, [19] and others recommend treating it only as a singular in connection with computers. [20] The IEEE Computer Society allows usage of data as either a mass noun or plural based on author preference, [21] while IEEE in the editorial style manual indicates to always use the plural form. [22] Some professional organizations and style guides [23] require that authors treat data as a plural noun. For example, the Air Force Flight Test Center once stated that the word data is always plural, never singular. [24] [ full citation needed ]

Related Research Articles

The English language was introduced to the Americas by the arrival of the British, beginning in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The language also spread to numerous other parts of the world as a result of British trade and settlement and the spread of the former British Empire, which, by 1921, included 470–570 million people, about a quarter of the world's population. In England, Wales, Ireland and especially parts of Scotland there are differing varieties of the English language, so the term 'British English' is an oversimplification. Likewise, spoken American English varies widely across the country. Written forms of British and American English as found in newspapers and textbooks vary little in their essential features, with only occasional noticeable differences.

British English is the set of varieties of the English language native to the island of Great Britain. More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in England, or, more broadly, to the collective dialects of English throughout the British Isles taken as a single umbrella variety, for instance additionally incorporating Scottish English, Welsh English, and Ulster English. Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English acknowledges that British English shares "all the ambiguities and tensions [with] the word 'British' and as a result can be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly, within a range of blurring and ambiguity".

In linguistics, a collective noun is a word referring to a collection of things taken as a whole. Most collective nouns in everyday speech are not specific to one kind of thing. For example, the collective noun "group" can be applied to people, or dogs, or objects.

Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves, is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, in sentences such as:

In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an object or subject within a phrase, clause, or sentence.

In linguistics, a mass noun, uncountable noun, non-count noun, uncount noun, or just uncountable, is a noun with the syntactic property that any quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit, rather than as something with discrete elements. Non-count nouns are distinguished from count nouns.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English plurals</span> How English plurals are formed; typically -(e)s

English plurals include the plural forms of English nouns and English determiners. This article discusses the variety of ways in which English plurals are formed from the corresponding singular forms, as well as various issues concerning the usage of singulars and plurals in English. For plurals of pronouns, see English personal pronouns.

The apostrophe is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for three basic purposes:

The plural, in many languages, 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 cats, which corresponds to the singular cat.

Capitalization or capitalisation is writing a word with its first letter as a capital letter and the remaining letters in lower case, in writing systems with a case distinction. The term also may refer to the choice of the casing applied to text.

In English, the plural form of words ending in -us, especially those derived from Latin, often replaces -us with -i. There are many exceptions, some because the word does not derive from Latin, and others due to custom. Conversely, some non-Latin words ending in -us and Latin words that did not have their Latin plurals with -i form their English plurals with -i, e.g., octopi is sometimes used as a plural for octopus. Prescriptivists consider these forms incorrect, but descriptivists may simply describe them as a natural evolution of language.

The numero sign or numero symbol, №, (also represented as Nº, No̱, No. or no.), is a typographic abbreviation of the word number(s) indicating ordinal numeration, especially in names and titles. For example, using the numero sign, the written long-form of the address "Number 22 Acacia Avenue" is shortened to "№ 22 Acacia Ave", yet both forms are spoken long.

<i>Plurale tantum</i> Noun that appears only in the plural form

A plurale tantum is a noun that appears only in the plural form and does not have a singular variant for referring to a single object. In a less strict usage of the term, it can also refer to nouns whose singular form is rarely used.

Several linguistic issues have arisen in relation to the spelling of the words euro and cent in the many languages of the member states of the European Union, as well as in relation to grammar and the formation of plurals.

In linguistics, synesis is a traditional grammatical/rhetorical term referring to agreement due to meaning.

An indefinite pronoun is a pronoun which does not have a specific, familiar referent. Indefinite pronouns are in contrast to definite pronouns.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Data</span> Units of information

In common usage, data is a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted formally. A datum is an individual value in a collection of data. Data is usually organized into structures such as tables that provide additional context and meaning, and which may themselves be used as data in larger structures. Data may be used as variables in a computational process. Data may represent abstract ideas or concrete measurements. Data is commonly used in scientific research, economics, and in virtually every other form of human organizational activity. Examples of data sets include price indices, unemployment rates, literacy rates, and census data. In this context, data represents the raw facts and figures from which useful information can be extracted.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English possessive</span> Possessive words and phrases in the English language

In English, possessive words or phrases exist for nouns and most pronouns, as well as some noun phrases. These can play the roles of determiners or of nouns.

In etymology, back-formation is the process or result of creating a new word via inflection, typically by removing or substituting actual or supposed affixes from a lexical item, in a way that expands the number of lexemes associated with the corresponding root word. The resulting is called a back-formation, a term coined by James Murray in 1889.

References

  1. ↑ New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1999
  2. ↑ "...in educated everyday usage as represented by the Guardian newspaper, it is nowadays most often used as a singular." http://www.lexically.net/TimJohns/Kibbitzer/revis006.htm
  3. ↑ "data, datum". Merriam–Webster's Dictionary of English Usage . Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster. 2002. pp. 317–318. ISBN   978-0-87779-132-4.
  4. ↑ "Data is a singular noun".
  5. ↑ "Grammarist: Data".
  6. ↑ "Dictionary.com Data".
  7. ↑ "Elitist, Superfluous, Or Popular? We Polled Americans on the Oxford Comma". FiveThirtyEight. 17 June 2014.
  8. ↑ Matt Dye (2001). "Writing Reports". University of Bristol.
  9. ↑ New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1999
  10. ↑ "...in educated everyday usage as represented by the Guardian newspaper, it is nowadays most often used as a singular." http://www.lexically.net/TimJohns/Kibbitzer/revis006.htm
  11. ↑ "When Serving the Lord, Ministers Are Often Found to Neglect Themselves". The New York Times. 2009. "Investment Tax Cuts Help Mostly the Rich". The New York Times. 2009.
  12. ↑ "Is Data Is, or Is Data Ain't, a Plural?". The Wall Street Journal. 2012.
  13. ↑ Norm Goldstein, ed. (June 2002). "collective nouns". Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus. p.  52. ISBN   0-7382-0740-3.{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |agency= ignored (help)
  14. ↑ R.W. Burchfield, ed. (1996). "data". Fowler's Modern English Usage (3rd ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp.  197–198. ISBN   0-19-869126-2.
  15. ↑ New Oxford Dictionary of English . 1999.
  16. ↑ Tim Johns (1997). "Data: singular or plural?". Archived from the original on 2009-02-11. ...in educated everyday usage as represented by The Guardian newspaper, it is nowadays most often used as a singular.
  17. ↑ "Data". Compact Oxford Dictionary . Archived from the original on 2008-06-15. Retrieved 2014-06-27.
  18. ↑ "Data: singular or plural?". Blair Wisconsin International University. Archived from the original on February 11, 2009.
  19. ↑ "Singular or plural". University of Nottingham Style Book. University of Nottingham. Archived from the original on July 26, 2010.
  20. ↑ "An introduction to data and information". OpenLearn . Archived from the original on March 4, 2016.
  21. ↑ "IEEE Computer Society Style Guide, DEF" (PDF). IEEE Computer Society. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-09-12. Retrieved 2015-09-28.
  22. ↑ "IEEE EDITORIAL STYLE MANUAL, DEF" (PDF). IEEE Periodicals. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-09-24. Retrieved 2015-09-28.
  23. ↑ "WHO Style Guide" (PDF). Geneva: World Health Organization. 2004. p. 43. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 1, 2010.
  24. ↑ The Author's Guide to Writing Air Force Flight Test Center Technical Reports. Air Force Flight Test Center.
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