The majority of nouns have distinct plural and singular forms. However, there are a number of special words that are spelled and pronounced exactly the same way in both their singular and plural forms. Here are 101 words that are both singular and plural.
If you are not sure how to convert a singular noun into a plural noun, check out our guide to how to convert a singular noun to a plural noun.
- Accommodation
- Advice
- Alms
- Aircraft
- Aluminum
- Barracks
- Bison
- Binoculars
- Bourgeois
- Breadfruit
- Cannon
- Caribou
- Cattle
- Chalk
- Chassis
- Chinos
- Clippers
- Clothing
- Cod
- Concrete
- Corps
- Correspondence
- Crossroads
- Deer
- Dice
- Doldrums
- Dungarees
- Education
- Eggfruit
- Elk
- Eyeglasses
- Fish (numbers of)
- Flares (clothing)
- Flour
- Food
- Fruit
- Furniture
- Gallows
- Goldfish
- Grapefruit
- Greenfly
- Grouse
- Haddock
- Halibut
- Head (cattle)
- Headquarters
- Help
- Homework
- Hovercraft
- Ides
- Insignia
- Jackfruit
- Jeans
- Knickers
- Knowledge
- Kudos
- Leggings
- Lego
- Luggage
- Moose
- Monkfish
- Mullet
- Nailclippers
- News
- Offspring
- Oxygen
- Pants
- Pyjamas
- Passionfruit
- Pike
- Pliers
- Police
- Premises
- Reindeer
- Rendezvous
- Salmon
- Scissors
- Series
- Shambles
- Sheep
- Shellfish
- Shorts
- Shrimp
- Smithereens
- Spacecraft
- Species
- Squid
- Starfruit
- Stone (weight)
- Sugar
- Swine
- Tongs
- Trousers
- Trout
- Tuna
- Tweezers
- You
- Wheat
- Whitebait
- Wood
Can you think of any words that are both plural and singular? Leave a comment and let us know!
Dice is the plural of die.
staff have no plural
shrimp, deer
gravel, crawfish
dice is also a cube you roll with dots/numbers.
Dozen, hundred, series
staves
Underwear
Hair
I think they may have meant it in terms of employment. where staff is the same in singular and plural.
I think they may have meant it in terms of employment. where staff is the same in singular and plural.
Tights
Gravel is plural. There is no singular for gravel.
Information
“Kin” as in next-of-kin or relative.
equipment
Money
Shrimp and deer are both on the list…
caboose
goods
Information
I bought a load of gravel – singular
I bought three loads of gravel – plural
Watercraft
Lol..
No. Dice is different from die.
Land?
Dozens, hundreds,.. What are u saying???
No, that is a die. A single polyhedron that is rolled to determine a random number is a die. Multiple polyhedrons that are rolled to determine a random number are dice.
As an adjective, cannon is neither singular nor plural. As a noun, cannon is singular and cannons are plural. A 21 cannon ship is a ship with 21 cannons. Bourgeoisie is plural for bourgeois. I have always said legos, but spellcheck tells me I’m wrong. Maybe legos is a Northwest US dialect word. Accommodations is plural and far more common than accommodation. Clothes is plural for both cloth and clothing. Although, I have used and heard clothing as plural regularly, so I guess it fits in this list. I have always used pikes for plural, and seen it in multiple books and games, and spellcheck agrees, but Merriam Webster seems to disagree with that usage. Just to confuse people, woods should also be included because woods is both a large group of trees and multiple large groups of trees, similar to a forest and multiple forests. I haven’t heard of a consensus on which is bigger, a woods or a forest.
Dat guy us right is just like radius and radii
Yes staff not for stick but for employees is the same in both forms
Isn’t plural of money..monies ?
My understanding is the word ‘people’ can be singular or plural. Plural of person is persons
You can have dozens of bullets and hundreds of dollars.
I see where you’re coming from. A single hair or a head of hair. But you can have three hairs as well. Or something can be three hairs wide.
bro we add ies instead of y where there is no vowel supporting y. like study it’ll be studies.. money is used in term of collective noun so we can’t use monies 🙂 if we’ll use then it’ll be as moneys but their is no plural 🙂
sorry dude but many of your words are not correct you have chosen the plural ones of many nouns
like
headquarter is singular and its plural is headquarters
and same as one of brothers have corrected some words like die is singular and dice and dies are the two plurals of it in which dice stand for a cube used in game of chance and dies is number of people etc
one of my brothers have commented some words like hundred, dozen, series
Listen up bro except series both of them have plurals but they can be used singularly in sentences. hundred have hundreds and dozen has dozens
like
i have three hundred pounds
we can use them as i have three hundreds of pounds
both are correct
give me 2 dozen of eggs
i need 2 dozens of eggs
it is up-to the sense you are using
similarly .. when we are using sentences in hunting situations we use many animals name both singular and plural same
like i m going to hunt elephant,birds, deer and fish 🙂
here we don’t mean of singular of every singular animals or birds. its upto the sense we are using 🙂 hope this help you guys .
Usman Agrees with you dude Both thumbs up :p
tea is also has same plural and singular
equiptment
How about -Equipment !
cod and trout
“License” and its plural “license” are mistreated daily in the news.
And, was “equipment” spelled “equiptment” in the past?
What is Ides?
Scenery
Good catch from their list
I picked up a piece of gravel.
I have several kinds of teas.
Military is both singular and plural, yet used incorrectly in the press.
Water, hair
Jargon
sugar is one right?
Can the word They, be singular? Instead of using the words he or she. What do you substitute.? That person is walking across the street?
but you could have dozens of bouncy balls or hundreds of dollars
News is only plural. Singular = a piece of news.
“Folk” is both singular and plural. So is “swine”
Sorry, “swine ” is already counted in the list; but watercress is not listed and that is the same in the plural as in the singular.
fruit – fruits ???
“glasses” and “spectacles”
Dental caries
A lot of these are mass nouns. You can have “a piece of clothing” or “two pieces of clothing” but you can’t have “a clothing” or “two clothings”.
Pant
There are several words in the list which have a singular version as well. That’s not the point. The point is that THIS WORD can denote both a singleton and a group.
Millwork
No, “news” is singular, generic. The news is bad. You’re right that the singular countable is a piece of news, several pieces of news.
Software, hardware, silverware, research, audience
Money is an obvious one
Vinyl
In this case, gravel isn’t the noun. Gravel is the set of things the noun is referring to. The noun in both “Three loads of gravel” and “One load of gravel” isn’t gravel; it’s load/s. As stated above, gravel doesn’t actually have a singular form.
Especially if you play your cards right at the bank. 😉
EQUIPMENT
Cologne
Music
that is only plural
you are right about Lego, in the UK we use it for both
People is the word as singular and also plural
Noun that have same singular and plural forms i.e. sheep, dear, fish take singular or plural verbs after them?
Grass
Today
Yes, you’re right.
What about “means”?
Just curious. I thought fox was both singular and plural. Is that something old and has been revised? I have always used it as both.
Hair
A cube you roll with the numbers 1 to 6 on it is called a die. If you have 2 or more of them they are called dice. But in the verb sense things are sort of backwards a person dies, but 2 or people die.
I think you are correct Ken.
Fishy answers? But I don’t think cattle is used in the singular sense. You don’t go over to a cattle. You go over to a cow or bull or steer. But interestingly you can have a herd of cattle or herd of cows, so in that sense cattle would be singular, but not used in general language to my knowledge.
Ken, you can have a piece of gravel it is a single stone. But many stones can be called gravel.
You can have 2 or 3 dozen, rarely have I heard of 2 or 3 dozens. Hundred is similar, one hundred, 2 hundred, 3 hundred etc.. But in both cases you can have expressions like ‘dozens of people turn up to the rally’ or ‘hundreds of cattle went to the yards’.
Equipment
Information and feedback
No, you say “the gravel is in the yard”; you don’t say “the gravel are in the yard”. Gravel is singular. A builders’ merchant might sell different gravels, and then it means “types of gravel”.
I’d personally never talk about “monies”, but I think lawyers do.
No, there are two different words here:
1. A person: plural persons (legal and technical use), or people (everyday use) = a human being.
2. A people: plural peoples = a race or nation.
It depends what you want them to be.
Singular: There is a black sheep in that field. I saw a red deer yesterday. You’ve caught a fish.
Plural: Those sheep seem to be scared. Scotland is a good place to see some deer. Fish were gathering below the bridge.
Sing: fox, Pl: foxes.
But people who hunt wild animals seem to have a habit of putting them in the singular. They say “We’re hoping to shoot some lion… This is a good area for gazelle… Fox? I don’t know. Yet all these have perfectly good plurals.
If this were my list, i would: remove all but the 31 words which are below and add ‘watercraft’.
I would keep these:
1: Aircraft
2: Bison
3: Caribou
4: Chalk
5: Cod
6: Deer
7: Eggfruit
8: Elk
9: Fish (numbers of)
10: Fruit
11: Goldfish
12: Grapefruit
13: Halibut
14: Hovercraft
15: Jackfruit
16: Moose
17: Monkfish
18: Offspring
19: Passionfruit
20: Pike
21: Reindeer
22: Salmon
23: Sheep
24: Shellfish
25: Shrimp
26: Spacecraft
27: Squid
28: Starfruit
29: Swine
30: Trout
31: You
BUT I am not trying to maximize my list. Some of these words are singular and plural, like ‘dice’ which *also* has a singular ‘die’. But I have seen ‘dice’ as the singular too. However, ‘die’ has been gaining popularity as the singular word for ‘dice’. Many of these are just stupid if you ask me, like ‘wood’, ‘aluminum’, and ‘oxygen’, etc. These are materials. They don’t have singular nor plural forms.
Things like ‘crossroads’ is certainly singular or plural, based on context. But this doesn’t count ‘in my book’. But if you want to maximize your list, then ‘crossroads’ is your friend. 😛
But i found what i came for. 🙂 Thanks!!
Isn’t swan an acceptable plural for swan.
Any regular fourth declension noun will have the same spelling for plural and singular, in the nominative case. E.g. status. Check the Latin root.
water and money are two other words that are both singular and plural
Scissors
All words are not used as same in plural. And here are some nouns that is used with noncount plural determiners such as furniture. These are the different issue. You can shorten the list.
Work
Works is not the plural of work
Scenery is a both singular and plural noun.
Yes there its called a Rock lol
In the US we say Math but, the British make the word plural by pronouncing it with an s Maths.
While it is a proper noun, technically, the plural of LEGO is LEGO. You can have A LEGO brick or multiple LEGO bricks, but according to LEGO, you can never have LEGOS.
We should also note the closely-related words which are described as “plural, construed as singular”. This covers countless fields of study such as mathematics, statistics, eugenics, economics, …
“Peoples” can be a plural of “people,” as in “indigenous peoples of the Americas.”
Cyclamen, a genus of plants in the Primula family, is the same whether singular or plural. You can go to a nursery and buy one cyclamen or ten cyclamen.
Salix, the name for the genus Willow, is the same whether singular or plural.
Machinery, correspondence, furniture
Information
Furniture
Scenery
Physics
In the US we say Math but, in Great Britain they say Maths making it a plural.
How can we make a plural for money
information
zero
Breath is a collective noun like the others but I do believe that we should consider Beer as such also. “I drank 10 beer” sounds better than “I drank 10 beers,” in my opinion
BA of English Language & Literature – ‘11
How about underwear.
Equipment
Oodles
Praetorean Guard. When I hear it see someone say Praetorean Guards, I cringe.
Hair!
Heritage
Livestock
stock
People!
Your listed word “dice” is the plural form. You would not use that word to reference a singular “die”. If playing a game where you roll a single numbered cube, you would say: “roll the die”. If two or more you would say: “roll the dice”.
Law