Grammatical Number – Singular or Plural for a Range of Dates?

“A wide range of features is available” is more ‘technically correct’ according to traditional prescriptive grammar, and arguably more logical.

Both forms are completely idiomatically acceptable, though; Google n-grams suggests that as of the 90’s, they were roughly equally common:

That shows just this specific example, which appears only in recent decades, but there are a host of other similar constructions, going back for centuries, and in many levels of writing, not just casual speech. So well-informed modern grammars agree, both forms are completely correct; go with whatever you feel flows best!

Edit: Actually, in contexts like yours, are is probably rather more common than that graph might suggest. Looking more closely, of the results for “range of features is”, quite a lot are in contexts like “The range of features is typically quite large…”, where “are” wouldn’t make sense — the predicate unambiguously applies to the range, not to the individual features. I can’t think of a corpus search that would weed out such cases; on a very rough perusal of Google Books results, I’d guesstimate that in contexts like yours where either is idiomatic (eg “…a remarkable range of features is/are visible…”), the are form is maybe about twice as common as the is. (Thanks to @FumbleFingers for pointing this out in comments.)

Edit: as comments on other answers show, the two versions aren’t always interchangeable; one can certainly come up with examples where only one or the other is idiomatic. But in this specific example, both are quite fine, as the n-grams search above and more in-depth searching along similar lines illustrate.

Your choice of temperature or temperatures can add information to your sentence.

For example, if you have the ability to set the temperature to discrete values, as you might have in a computer program, then the plural form helps to convey that. It also applies if the temperatures have been set in experiments or tests, even if these are not explicit. A motor oil, for example, might be usable over a range of air temperatures.

On the other hand, if the temperature can vary continuously, and is not settable, nor being sampled at discrete points, and if the range is more central to the thought, then the singular form can help.

For example: “The range of temperature across the stage was exactly opposite to the range of illumination. If you could see your music on the stand in front of you, you were probably wrapped up too tightly to play it.”

In most cases you can use either form. However, because we humans are so fond of measuring things, range of temperatures will often sound more natural.