I just came across the phrase "Two are better than one", but I had always heard it in my head as "Two is better than one". This is partially due to the Boys Like Girls song. Which one of these is actually correct?
Learn English – “Two are better than one” or “Two is better than one”
grammatical-numberverb-agreement
Related Solutions
This question is more complex than it may appear. There seems to be consensus that a singular verb should be used in formal writing whenever the subject of a sentence is more than one [noun], or at least that this is (much) better than ?there are more than one. I subscribe to this.
It does not matter how many things the writer might expect there to be in reality: it is always if there is more than one species.
Nor does it matter what noun comes after one. It is always is; the word one forces a singular verb without apparent exception.
But why does this at all surprise us?
We are puzzled by this construction because the subject does not agree with the verb—at least not if analyzed according to conventional grammar. Consider the following sentence:
There are more men in the room.
Is would be impossible. The sentence is easy enough to analyse:
- more men = subject
- are = finite verb
No problem there: subject and verb agree. More men is the subject, or at least the head of the subject.
There are more men than just John in the room.
The core of the syntax remains the same; the core of the subject is still more men. The addition than x is either an elliptical clause or a prepositional phrase that is part of the subject, depending on your model; in any case, than x is not what determines whether it is are or is. More men are is the core of the sentence.
There is more than one man in the room.
Suddenly the verb changes. Has the core syntax of the sentence changed? No: for the sake of consistency, we must say more is the subject and is the finite verb. The phrase than x is still not the head of the subject, no more than in the first sentence (there are more men than just John). If more is the head, then it must be elliptical, since it is only an adjective: more of what? If we hypothetically supply the omitted noun, we get:
*There is more [men] than one man in the room.
There is no other word that we could fill in, though of course this is wrong: *there is more men is both unidiomatic in this register and in violation of the rule that subject and verb must agree.
Then what causes this singular is in there is more than one man? The phrase than x should not determine the number of the verb: and yet it does. That is why this construction is idiomatic, as opposed to regular: it violates the rule that subject and verb must agree. But it is by all means "correct". That is what idiom is: a widely accepted phrase that violates the regularity of our language. However some of us might like it to be, language is just never regular in all respects; this bit of idiom happens to have triumphed over regularity and is now the norm. Idiom must be judged case by case and often varies across registers and dialects.
But could this disagreement of subject and verb be explained away by other factors? Let's see what I can come up with.
It could be that the somewhat fixed phrase there is is what does it. But that phrase could not explain singular is in this sentence:
More than one man is still in the house.
Could this is be explained by the immediate precedence of one man? It is conceivable that the singular number of one man leads us to an anacoluthon in the next word is: we see a singular number and noun, and we cannot resist the pressure of proceeding with a singular verb. But then this phenomenon should not occur if the verb came before the subject:
Not only has more than one man been seen near the power plant, but...
*Not only have more than one man been seen near the power plant, but
It seems clear that have would be wrong, even more so than in the previous sentence patterns. So whether the verb comes before or after doesn't matter.
How can this oddity of disagreement be explained? If we look at it reductionistically, in terms of association and pattern recognition as they occur in the brain, I suspect that the word one exerts such an enormous influence on our perception of a sentence that it overrules more, despite the ordinarily forcing rule of agreement; it does so even despite the sense of multitude inherent in the phrase more than one man as a whole, which must always refer to multiple objects in reality. When we write one man, we have the image of one man at an irresistibly prominent place in our working memory. (Other, somewhat similar idioms exist, so I don't believe this to be a unique situation.)
Syntactically, the phrase better-than-nothing is an adjective. As such, it does not take a plural.
But adjectives can be used as nouns (just as nouns can be used as adjectives). Generally the adjective refers to an implied noun made clear by context.
When selecting among the various colors, he chose the blue [one/color].
When used as a noun, an adjective can be pluralized in the same manner as most nouns, by simply adding s.
When selecting among the various colors, he chose the blues.
If the context of your usage for better-than-nothing uses it like a noun, it should be pluralized in the same way.
She wanted something better, but she settled for better-than-nothing.
She sought better things, but often settled for better-than-nothings.
If you are merely reporting on the existence of the term better-than-nothing, then it takes on a noun-like meaning of its own.
He counted the times the term "better-than-nothing" appeared in the text.
There were ten "better-than-nothings" in each chapter.
The correct way to pluralize the term is to simply add an s. The use of an 's suggest either possessive or a contraction.
If you are cataloging the term, rather than using it for its meaning, add quotation marks around the whole term (including the s when it is plural).
Similarly, if you are effectively defining or establishing a catchphrase, you can set it off in quotes (usually only the first time it is used), again with the s inside the quotes if plural.
Best Answer
TL;DR: Usually choose are.
The question asks which of these two “is actually correct”:
Unfortunately, there can be no answer to that question. It’s a leading question. The problem is that the question by its nature forces the answerer to concede that only one of them is “correct”, necessarily leaving the other in some “incorrect” category.
But that isn’t how English works: English isn’t a multiple choice quiz with one “correct” answer. Both versions occur in print by native speakers, and so both versions (can) have their place.
The clearest case for choosing the singular is when one is talking about the numbers themselves, such as saying:
Then you really must use the singular form, since you are really just saying that 2 > 1 — or in other words:
However, in most other circumstances, you are talking about two somethings, and two somethings are more likely to take a plural verb than a singular verb.
If you look at historical usage, the singular version was virtually unknown until comparatively recently, at least in this Google N-gram:
You do still have to dive into the actual citations for the two is case and the two are case separately.
The singular choice is nearly unknown in the 1800s, although there is this example dating from the Annual Register of 1800:
That is example of nominal agreement, where the collection of two together is the thing being considered.
In contrast, the far more numerous plural examples are thinking of two items separately. Certainly when the number is just a cardinal number used in a noun phase, like saying two people are at the door, then there is never any question of the plural being the only grammatical choice.
However, it is really only in the last 50 years that the singular version has caught on much. Also, if you change the search to look only in (allegedly) British sources versus (allegedly) American sources, you will find that the British sources have a higher ratio of plural to singular than the American ones have. Note however that in both cases, the plural is still more common.
If you look at the Corpus of Contemporary American English 1990–2012, it has 3 citations of the singular two is better than one (2 spoken and 1 fiction) compared with 2 citations of the plural two are better than one (1 spoken and 1 fiction). That isn’t really much to go on. If you relax the constraint by dropping the than one part, then there are 7 citations for the singular and 4 for the plural.
If it were me, I would in most cases go along with most writers not just of yesteryear but also of today and choose the plural version just like they did.
That is the best I can do for answering the leading question of which one is “actually correct”: a long exposition demonstrating that the question is itself flawed, and that while both can have their place, usually the plural version works better.