Introduction to singular and plural nouns | Grammar | Khan Academy Video Lecture | Complete Course on English Grammar: Upgrade your Speaking & Listening - Personal Skills

hello grammarians let's talk about
singular and plural nouns now nouns as
we discussed previously are a type of
word they are a part of speech and a
noun is any word that is a person a
place a thing or an idea and in English
we can figure out just by looking at a
noun whether or not there is one of
something whether it's singular or
whether or not there is more than one of
something and there's an easy way to
tell the difference between singular and
plural so if you break the words down
singular contains the word single single
means there's only one of it plural is
maybe a little bit less obvious but it
comes to us from Latin it comes to us
from this word loose which means more
which you know you might recognize Plus
as we call it in English from
mathematics from arithmetic we usually
say it looks like this little plus
symbol so whenever you think whenever
you see plural just think more just
think plus there is more than one
singular is one thing plural more than
one thing there's more so let's go
through it let's let's do some examples
and I'll show you how you make the
plural in English how do you indicate
using your language that there is more
of one thing so let's just throw out a
couple of words
we got dog cat dinosaur and whale and
all you need to do to make it plural is
very simple you just take an S and you
add it onto the end like so dogs cats
dinosaurs whales so if you want to make
something plural think about plus more
all you have to do is add an S like that
add an S this is what we call the
regular plural this is the regular
plural
and what that means is it obeys this one
rule all you have to do to say that
there's more than one dog is throw in an
S and we're lucky because most English
nouns
hey that way most nouns are regular
however here's the bad news there are
some irregular plurals they are not
regular thus irregular not so now we
have words like leaf and child and
fungus which is like a mushroom mouse
and sheep so how would you you know you
can't just add an S to these that's
unfortunately not how these nouns work
in English you can't say Leafs and child
and funguses and Mouse's and sheeps this
is how you do it each one of these words
corresponds to a class of words that has
its own unique pluralization standards
so leaf becomes leaves child becomes
children fungus becomes fungi mouse
becomes mice and sheep stays sheep
believe it or not so these are the
irregular plurals and we'll be covering
each of these in turn in later videos
but for now I just want you to focus on
the regular plural which again we can
sum up in this way all you have to do is
add an S here's a good example right so
we have one elephant here and down here
we have two elephants and the only
difference between this word and this
word is that this one has an S on the
end of it so if we wanted to say that
this elephant here was not in fact one
elephant and was two elephants all we
have to do is add an S we're changing it
from singular to plural and remember
plural comes from plus you add an S so
one elephant becomes two elephants doop
doop doop do doop doop world's fastest
elephant tryingo dananananana all right
it's kind of an elephant monkey but you
get the vague idea if you're ever in
need of more than one thing
for the regular plural just add an S you
can learn anything Dave it out