Question e-mailed by Mr. Lino S. Cruz of Quezon City (August 2, 2014):Is there such a thing as a “mass noun”? If so, please differentiate it from a “collective noun.”
My reply to Mr. Lino Cruz:Yes, there’s definitely such a thing as a “mass noun.” A
mass noun denotes a substance or concept that’s not divisible into countable units and, in the English language in particular, it is preceded in indefinite constructions by such modifiers as “some” or “much” rather than by the articles “a” or “one.” Typical examples of mass nouns are substances such as “water,” “sand,” “oil,” and “air”; items such as “rice,” “sugar,” “luggage,” and “furniture”; and concepts such as “happiness,” “loneliness,” and “dishonesty.” (This early, though, I won’t differentiate a mass noun from a collective noun yet to avoid confusing you while we take up the ways that nouns are classified in English.)
As a rule, a mass noun is one that can’t be directly modified by a number without providing a specific unit of measurement. Thus, we can’t say “12 waters” or “a dozen waters” but can say “12 liters of water” and “a dozen gallon-jugs of water”; we can’t say “50 rices” but can say “50 kilos of rice” or “one sack of rice”; and we can’t say “6 happinesses” or “10 dishonesties” but can say “6 periods of happiness” and “10 instances of dishonesty.”
One notable exception to this rule is when a mass noun is used to refer to different units or types of it. The mass noun then becomes countable; in the case of the mass nouns “coffee” and “bread,” for instance, it becomes perfectly grammatical to say “She finished
four coffees in ten minutes flat” and “I like
different breads for breakfast for every day of the week.”
Mass nouns actually fall under the category of
noncount nouns, which denote things that can’t be counted because they are considered as a whole that can’t be divided into parts. The polar opposite of noncount nouns are, of course, the
count nouns, which denote objects or ideas that can form a plural or occur in a noun phrase with an indefinite article or with numerals.
Specifically, we can use a count noun with a numeral, modify it by the words “many” or “few” and by the indefinite article “a” or “an,” and generally can affix “s” or “-es” to it to make it plural, as in “The business magnate has
many cars—
10 cars in all—and
a private jet as well.” In contrast, we can’t do those things to a noncount noun. This is why in the case of the noncount noun “heat,” we can’t say “a heat,” “three heats,” “few heats,” or “many heats”; we can only qualify or measure “heat” in terms of degree or intensity, as in “extreme heat,” “overpowering heat,” or “95-degree heat under the shade.”
Now that it’s clear how mass nouns, count nouns, and noncount nouns differ from one another, we should be ready to differentiate a collective noun from a mass noun. By definition, a
collective noun denotes a collection of persons, animals, or things regarded as a unit or taken as a whole. We shouldn’t confuse it with a
mass noun, which, as defined earlier, denotes a substance or concept that’s not divisible into countable units.
Typical and rather mundane examples of collective nouns are “group,” “family,” “company,” and “confederacy”; they aren’t specific to a particular object and can generally be used to denote various kinds of collectives, as in the case of “a group of insurance companies,” “a family of thieves,” and “a confederacy of dunces.” Specifically for the animal kingdom, though, the English language has come up with an amazingly large subset of collective nouns known as
terms of venery, or unique words for groups of particular animals, such as “a school of fish,” “a pride of lions,” “a parliament of owls,” and “a troop of baboons.”
To enrich your collective-noun vocabulary, check out Wikipedia’s list of several dozens of
terms of venery alphabetically classified by animal. For a better gut-feel of these very interesting collective nouns, also check out the graphics in this earlier posting in the Forum,
“Ever wondered why we have all these anthropomorphic collective nouns?”I trust that this discussion has given you a better understanding of the various types of nouns in English, and that it will encourage you to do a continuing, more wide-ranging exploration of the English lexicon.
RELATED READINGS IN THE FORUM ON THE KINDS OF NOUNS:When to use the singular or plural verb form for mass nouns and count nouns“Can the indefinite article ‘a’ or ‘an’ be used with uncountable/abstract nouns?
