Learn English – What’s the plural of “Confirmation of Entry”

compoundsgrammatical-number

I've recently wondered about the plural of the expression "Confirmation of Entry". A "Confirmation of Entry" is a piece of paper that Cambridge Assessment English gives candidates who are going to take a test. This document shows the details of the candidates as well as the test date and schedule. So recently I read "Confirmation of Entries" on a website and it read really weird, so I thought that it would be more appropriate to write "Confirmations of Entry". However, someone else suggested that it would be more correct to make both plural ("Confirmations of Entries"), so now I'm really unsure as to which is the best option. I would appreciate some feedback. Thanks.

Best Answer

Letter of recommendation (s)
Letters of recommendation (pl)
Letter of recommendations = A single letter with a list of recommendations
Letters of recommendations = Two or more letters, each one listing several recommendations.

Think of it like this:

We have one letter of confirmation (s)
We have two letters of confirmation (pl)
We have a confirmation of entry (s)
We have two confirmations of entry (pl)

There can only be one admission per exam, not a letter confirming several admissions for the same candidate entering for a single exam. Two confirmations refer to two individual candidates.

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Grammatical Number – Correct Plural Form of “Premise”

Merriam-Webster give an example using premises: <the basic premises of the argument>.

I do not think there is anything wrong with this use of premises. I don’t find homophony or having multiple meanings to be valid reasons to criticize use of a word.

Learn English – What’s the plural of quantum

Merriam-Webster, Wiktionary, The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, and the Collins English Dictionary all list only quanta as the plural form. So if I wanted to be on the safe side, I'd recommend that over quantums. The usage stats from the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English look as follows:

         BNC   COCA

quanta    35     95
quantums   0      3

Google results are too skewed to be included, as Quanta seems to be a popular proper name.

Best Answer

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