uncountable noun

Nouns that cannot be divided or counted as individual elements or separate parts are called uncountable nouns (also known as mass nouns or non-count nouns). These can be tangible objects (such as substances or collective categories of things), or intangible or abstract things, such as concepts or ideas. Nouns that can be divided are called countable nouns, or simply count nouns.

mass noun

A noun, such as furniture, water, or honesty, that cannot be modified by the indefinite article, does not occur in the plural, and is often preceded by modifiers such as some or much or by a phrase containing a unit of measurement. Some nouns can function both as mass nouns (There are sixty boxes of tile in the warehouse) and as count nouns (We had to cut a tile in half to fit the end of the row). Also called noncount noun. See Usage Note at collective noun.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

mass noun

(Linguistics) a noun that refers to an extended substance rather than to each of a set of isolable objects, as, for example, water as opposed to lake. In English when used indefinitely they are characteristically preceded by some rather than a or an; they do not have normal plural forms. Compare count noun

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

mass′ noun`

a noun, as water, electricity, or happiness, that typically refers to an indefinitely divisible substance or an abstract notion and that in English cannot be used, in such a sense, with the indefinite article or in the plural. Compare count noun.

[1930–35]

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun

mass noun - a noun that does not form plurals

noun - a content word that can be used to refer to a person, place, thing, quality, or action

Translations

denombre incontablesustancia

ainesana

nom massif

niet-telbaar substantiefniet-telbaar zelfstandig naamwoord

Mentioned in

References in periodicals archive

Earlier on Wednesday, Rahul, took a jibe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi by posting on Twitter a screenshot of the entry in the English Living Dictionaries, which described 'Modilie' as a mass noun, that meant "to constantly modify the truth", "to lie incessantly and habitually" and 'to lie without respite'.

Rahul Gandhi's claim on 'Modilie' is 'fake', no such word exists: Oxford Dictionaires

Last week, we responded to podcast listener Josh Bloom's question about the mass noun "bagel," as in, "I'm going out to the deli to get some appetizing and some bagel." We thought we'd covered the ground well enough: we talked plural noun versus mass noun, we discussed the severe abnormality of the Philadelphia Blooms, and we even suggested other uses he could explore (Unorthodox host Stephanie Butnick: "I'd like to start using 'bagel' as a verb, the way 'Uber' has become one.

Ask Unorthodox: I Got Bageled!

Dabrowska (1997: 10) mentioned contrast between specific instances of Polish singular v English plural nouns, such as "Polish fasola (a mass noun) and English beans [...]".

A cognitive comparison of nouns--English v Polish

Perspective (mass noun): True understanding of the relative importance of things; a sense of proportion.

Old Firm's crackpot fringe is in its element ... every loonball theory cultivated, nurtured and grown for 3 years has arrived at its mothership

The mass noun with an attributive function in the predicate nominal also always remains singular, and here there is no agreement in number, e.g.

The function of the singular form of nouns in the Hungarian language

As noted both by Wagner (2005) and Hernandez (2011), gendered pronouns are not commonly applied to mass noun referents.

'I'll cross dat brig whin I come til him': grammatical gender in the Orkney and Shetland dialects of Scots

What we find here is that twice must be used in place of two times in the (a) sentences and also in the (b) sentences, involving as many as (for a countable noun such as kangaroos) or as much as (for a mass noun such as money).

Twice and constituency

Eall precedes a countable noun in (42) and a mass noun in (43):

Old English semantic primes: substantives, determiners and quantifiers

Is "water" a count noun or a mass noun? systems like TEAM present the user with sample sentences:

Knowledge and natural language processing

Dog: a singular noun, although it needs an article or quantifier to show that, as in "A dog is barking" or "Some dog is barking." Dogs: a plural noun, as in "The dogs are barking." Dog: a mass noun, as when a person in a country where dogs are eaten might say, "Let's have dog for dinner tonight" (and be damned to eternity for that).

THE WORLD AS PROCESS

In addition, the suffix -chen can turn a mass noun into a count noun, thus functioning as a classifier (15b).

Syntactic variation in expressive size suffixes: a comparison of Russian, German, and Spanish

Consider firstly the other kind of structure in which less can occur, illustrated by (14a), with a mass noun:

No less than four notes on less