Learn English – the noun to use when describing the characteristic of another word being plural (or not)

grammatical-numbersingle-word-requests

In editing a document, I changed a word from a singular form to a plural one, and I want to leave a comment explaining what I did. The comment I wanted to write went something like this: "changed the ??? of this word for consistency".

My first guesses were "plurality" or "multiplicity", but after reviewing the definitions of those, I'm don't think that's quite right.

Any suggestions?

Best Answer

It's called the grammatical number of the noun:

In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two", or "three or more").[1]

But you can use number agreement if you're specifically comparing one word's grammatical number to another's.

Also, plurality is in fact an accepted word for this:

In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity (i.e., grammatical number) representing a value of "other-than-one".

Take your choice.

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