What verb form should I use when talking about two uncountable items?
Which of these sentences is correct?
1.There are lightning and thunder.
2.There is lightning and thunder.
Learn English – Verb for two uncountable items
uncountable-nounsverb-forms
Best Answer
Lightning and thunder are both uncountable nouns, but there are two of them, i.e. it is possible to count uncountable-noun words. For this reason we use the plural form are:
The confusion arises because we also have an idiomatic phrase in English thunder and lightning, which is treated as a (singular) noun phrase:
Technically you could break the noun-phrase from the singular "thunder and lightning" back into its constitutent parts of "thunder" and "lightning" and so something like this is technically grammatical:
It is grammatical (replace the nouns to see this fact: "the rain and hail are pretty scary!" is perfectly grammatical), but it is extremely unidiomatic, and no native English speaker would say it.