Plurale_tantum

A plurale tantum (plural: pluralia tantum) is a noun that appears only in the plural form and does not have a singular variant, though it may still refer to one or many of the objects it names. Many languages have pluralia tantum, such as the English words "scissors" and "pants", or the Swedish word inälvor "intestines".

The term for a noun which appears only in the singular form is singulare tantum (plural: singularia tantum), for example the English words "dust" and "wealth". Singulare tantum is defined by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as: "Gram. A word having only a singular form; esp. a non-count noun."The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993 edition, p. 2871. In the English language, such words are almost always uncountable nouns.

In English, quantifying a plurale tantum noun requires a measure word, for example one pair of scissors instead of *one scissors. In other languages, special numeral forms are used in such cases. In Polish, for example, "one pair of eyeglasses" is expressed as either jedne okulary (one-plur. glasses-plur.) or jedna para okularów (one-sing. pair-sing. glasses-gen. plur.). For larger quantities, "collective numeral" forms are available: troje drzwi (three doors), pięcioro skrzypiec (five violins). Compare these to the ordinary numeral forms found in trzy filmy / pięc filmów (three films / five films).Swan, Oscar E. (2002). A Grammar of Contemporary Polish. Bloomington, IN: Slavica, pp. 200–201. ISBN 0-89357-296-9. 

See also

Look up plurale tantum in
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Elohim
• English plural
• Synesis
• Wiktionary list of English pluralia tantum.

References

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