According to Newbury House Dictionary of American English, "service" is an uncountable noun when it means the care of a machine to keep it in good working order: When our oven broke, we called a repairman for service . According to

I'm Australian, and it's always 'tanned' here. But I would contend that is what it's intended to be in American English, too. I always used to read/hear 'tanned' in American media and books, and it's only in recent

That explanation is more germane to British English, and it seems satisfactory. Most collective nouns are treated invariably as singular nouns in American English. CJ

Welcome to the EnglishForums! Please register - it's free and then your postings will not have to be moderated. In the case of uncountable nouns American English and British English often differ in their rules. Various pieces of information

You can in fact use both since the word swarm is a collective noun But keep in mind that the singular is the usual, and almost exclusive, solution for collective nouns in American English. CJ

There are potentially differences here between American English and British English. I'm a British English speaker, so my reply reflects British English usage. With nouns such as "team", "group", "committee"

It seems that "headed" rather than heading has now entered the mainstream of English as it is used in the UK, possibly because of the use of American English spelling and grammar checkers. Until recently in the UK we used only the

I really don't understand your question. You are asking for a plural noun that behaves like a singular word? That is a contradiction in terms. There are some collective nouns which behave differently between British and American English (i.e.

Hi AlpheccaStars and Mr. Wordy, Thanks for you help. One American client says to me: a celebration dinner, while I saw a post in Yahoo, saying Beckham is having a celebratory dinner. Do you think it's probably because the

Thank you. I think I got it. According to Heinle's Newbury House Dictionary of American English, "Knowledge" is used as a countable or uncountable noun depending on the context. 1 an area of learning: The study of English (math,