Possessives come up a lot in this column. That’s no surprise. They’re some of the most perplexing issues in English, as we saw in our recent column on Jess’s vs. Jess’ (P.S. both are acceptable). But ...

In the animal kingdom, more than one moose are still moose, while a mongoose and his friends are mongooses, yet a goose and her flock are geese. Go figure. An error ...

The word ‘plural’ comes from the Old French ‘plurel’ which means ‘more than one’. A noun is a word used to identify something.There are a lot of nouns.There are many patterns to look out for when you ...

Have you ever corrected someone mid-conversation because what he said just didn't sound right? What I'm talking about is words that sound like plurals and possessives but shouldn't be and vice versa.

When Vice President Dan Quayle "corrected" a student's spelling of "potato" to "potatoe" back in 1992, people laughed. But some of us might have trouble spelling its plural form. Is it "potatos" or ...

A natural follow-up to my last column about words that live in the plural seemed to be one about words that don't get the regular "s" at the end. Certain words shun the final "s" to become plural.

Algae thrives in sunlight. Or is it algae thrive? These are the questions that can broadside a copy editor years, even decades, into her career. When it comes to English, there’s never a point where ...

Is the verb after the phrase ‘number of’ singular or plural? A simple rule is that if ‘the’ precedes the phrase ‘number of’, then the verb after the phrase is singular. For example, n The number of ...

Q: I drive a school bus, and this morning one of my seventh graders said to me, “Monte, did you see those deers on the side of the road?” I explained to him that certain words, like “deer,” are both ...