Appendix 4

Nouns not normally countable in English: accommodation, advice, anger, applause, assistance, baggage, behaviour, bread, business (= trade), capital (= money), cardboard, cash, chaos, chess, china, clothing, coal, conduct, cookery, countryside, courage, crockery, cutlery, damage, dancing, dirt, education, evidence, flu, food, fruit, fun, furniture, garbage, gossip (= talk about other people), grass, hair (hairs = separate strands of hair, hair = all the hairs on the head), happiness, harm, help, homework, hospitality, housework, information, jealousy, jewellery, knowledge, laughter, leisure, lightning, linen, luck, luggage, macaroni, machinery, meat, money, moonlight, mud, music, news, nonsense, parking, patience, peel, permission, poetry, the post (= letters), produce, progress, rubbish, safety, scaffolding, scenery, seaside, sewing, shopping, smoking, soap, spaghetti, spelling, steam, strength, stuff, stupidity, sunshine, thunder, timber, toast (= bread), traffic, transport, travel, underwear, violence, vocabulary, wealth, weather, work, writing

Partitives: nouns which refer to part of a whole

We can refer to a single item (a loaf of bread), a part of a whole (a slice of bread) or a collection of items (a packet of biscuits) by means of partitives. Partitives are useful when we want to refer to specific pieces of an uncountable substance, or to a limited number of countable items. They can be singular (a piece of paper; a box of matches) or plural (two pieces of paper; two boxes of matches) and are followed by ‘of' when used before a noun.

Words such as piece and (less formal) bit can be used with a large number of uncountables (concrete or abstract): singular: a piece of/bit of chalk/cloth/information/meat/plastic plural: pieces of/bits of chalk/cloth/information/meat/plastic.

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