1Types or varieties of:
•food and drink, e.g. yogurt/yogurts, pasta/pastas, rum/rums.
•plants: e.g. clover/clovers, barley/barleys.
•fabric: e.g. gingham/ginghams, silk/silks.
•certain languages or subjects: e.g. English/Englishes, music/musics.
•metals and alloys: e.g. steel/steels, solder/solders.
•rocks: e.g. granite/granites, lava/lavas, clay/clays.
•chemical compounds: e.g. fluoride/fluorides, hydride/hydrides.
•other substances or materials: e.g. rind/rinds, soil/soils, sealskin/sealskins, suncream/suncream.
2Portions or units of something, especially food and drink: e.g. lager (glasses/ bottles of lager = lagers), paella (portions of paella = paellas).
3Shades of colours: e.g. pink/pinks, scarlet/scarlets, grey/greys.
4An instance of:
•an action or process: e.g. completion (an instance of completing a property sale = completions), genocide (act of genocide = genocides), lambing (an act of lambing = lambings).
•a surgical operation: e.g. circumcision/circumcisions.
•an emotion, pain, or feeling: e.g. backache/backaches, grief (an instance or cause of grief = griefs).
5An area of land of a specified type: e.g. bogland/boglands, terrain/terrains.
Other terms relating to nouns
[as modifier]: used to mark a noun which can be placed before another noun in order to modify its meaning. For examples see boom and bedside.
[treated as sing.]: used to mark a noun which is plural in form but is used with a singular verb, e.g. ‘mumps’ in mumps is one of the major childhood diseases or ‘genetics’ in genetics has played a major role in this work.
[treated as sing. or pl.]: used to mark a noun which can be used with either a singular or a plural verb without any change in meaning or in the form of the headword (often called collective nouns, because they typically denote groups of people considered collectively), e.g. the government are committed to this policy or the government is trying to gag its critics.
[in sing.]: used to mark a noun which is used as a count noun but is never or rarely found in the plural, e.g. ear in an ear for rhythm and melody.
Terms relating to verbs
[with obj.]: used to mark a verb which takes a direct object, i.e. is transitive (the type of direct object being shown in brackets in the definition). For example, see belabour.
[no obj.]: used to mark a verb which takes no direct object, i.e. is intransitive. For example, see bristle.
[with adverbial]: used to mark a verb which takes an obligatory adverbial, typically a prepositional phrase, without which the sentence in which the verb occurs would sound unnatural or odd, e.g. barge into under barge.
Terms relating to adjectives
[attrib.]: used to mark an adjective which is normally used attributively, i.e. comes before the noun which it modifies, e.g. certain in a certain man (not the man is certain, which means something very different). Note that attributive use is standard for many adjectives, especially those in specialist or technical fields: the [attrib.] label is not used in such cases.
[predic.]: used to mark an adjective which is normally used predicatively, i.e. comes after the verb, e.g. ajar in the door was ajar (not the ajar door).
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