Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Much vs. Many

I thought this topic might be interesting to bring up. I can’t speak for everyone else, but sometimes I find myself mixing up the word many with the word much. For example, I would say, “how much pounds do you weigh?” or “how much friends do you have?” Thanks to our copyediting class, my personal grammar is improving each week. After doing a search on the proper usage of these words online, I learned that much is used if a noun is singular and many is used if a noun is plural. So, it would have been more appropriate to have said, “how many pounds do you weigh?” and “how many friends do you have?”

Now how much (just kidding…many) of you knew about that? See you all in class on Friday!

1 comment:

ceruleanjen said...

Hmm, okay, I'm hardly an expert on grammar (hahaha), but I was thinking about this one, and I don't know if it's so much plural vs. singular nouns so much as it's about countable vs. uncountable nouns. Don't worry, I had to google for this. I don't just have this filed away in my memory. ;) According to this site, "much" and "many" are called determiners. And here's a table from that site:

Used with Countable Nouns
many
more
most
few
fewer
fewest

Used with Uncountable Nouns
much
more
most
little
less
least