It's Time to End the 'Data Is' vs 'Data Are' Debate (vice.com)

dmoberhaus writes: After receiving too many irate emails about using "data" in the singular, a reporter spoke to two lexicographers about how the language changes over time and why it's perfectly acceptable and perhaps even "standard" to use data as a singular noun, rather than a plural noun in an attempt to settle an old debate. Peter Sokolowski, a lexicographer for the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, told the reporter that data's transition between its historical roots and contemporary use is related to a lexical phenomenon called "semantic bleaching," where a word's original meaning is lost or diminished over time. An example of semantic bleaching include the contemporary use of the word "literally," whose Latin root, littera, means "letter." In the case of "data," it has transitioned from "things given" to mean something like "a collection of information in aggregate" when used in everyday speech.

Comments

Plural in Latin, singular in English

[Tough Love]

Plural in Latin, singular mass noun in English, does it need to be any more complicated? Strictly speaking, if you mean to write the latin word in English prose then you should italicize it.

Re:What debate?

[dgatwood]

The problem is that the word is more commonly used now as a synonym for "information". You would never say "informations". At this point, it is mostly treated as plural in scientific contexts, and even there, it has often been superseded by the compound word "data point", which is obviously and trivially pluralizable.

BTW, Oxford weighed in a while back.

Re:What debate?

[dgatwood]

For example, you never say: "I found a data" just like you never say "I found a stuff".

I agree. However, the reason you would never say that is because "stuff" is uncountable. Using the article "a" is nonsensical, because that implies that there can be exactly one of something, and thus it must be countable. Just as you can't have exactly one, you can't have more than one, hence it is neither singular nor plural, per se. If "data" can't be used in that way for the same reason, then it, too, is an uncountable mass noun.

So no... the word "data" cannot be singular.

Except uncountable nouns in English always take a singular verb, e.g. "This stuff is gross," not "This stuff are gross". "The flour is in the cupboard," not "The flour are in the cupboard," and so on.

The only way "data" can be plural is if you treat it as the plural of datum, which only makes sense if you are talking about a specific, countable set of data points. The result of an experiment produces data that is a collection of datum, hence ostensibly countable, so using it in the plural form is acceptable. When we start talking about the flow of data across a network, that's not really countable in any meaningful sense, because it varies from moment to moment, so it is uncountable, and must take a singular verb.