Should you say a person’s whereabouts "is" unknown or "are" unknown? Dictionaries say "whereabouts" is one of those words that may be used with either a singular or a plural verb. One reference book ...

As terse as they normally are, newspaper headlines are designed to get your attention by, as much as possible, summarizing the main body text. Two words in last week’s headline of this column; ...

An anonymous reader from downstate Marion had a seemingly simple pair of questions: "Would you say, 'The couple has - or have - three children?' And 'The couple has - or have - one child"? Once I ...

It’s spring cleaning time — an opportunity to sweep out dust bunnies lurking in recesses of recent reading. Let’s start with various forms of disagreement between singular and plural elements in a ...

I recently fielded questions about two subject-verb agreement errors that readers noticed in the media. One was heard on an NPR program. The other was committed by, um, a columnist who should have ...

Although English-language verbs generally don’t inflect or change in form to agree with the subject in number, they do so in the present tense, third-person singular. In English grammar, in this ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...

We can use singular or plural verbs with many collective nouns, Pamela, and government is one of these. Singular and plural forms are often mixed as are the pronouns that refer back to the nouns in ...