[tz] [PATCH] The word "data" is plural.

Alan Mintz Alan_Mintz+TZ_IANA at Earthlink.net
Thu Aug 14 01:23:08 UTC 2014


At 2014-08-12 22:27, Paul Eggert wrote:

>... To try to head this dispute off at the pass the attached new patch 
>(pushed into the experimental version) rewords everything so that the word 
>"data" is never used in a context that requires it to be plural, or that 
>requires it to be plural either.

Re-casting is usually the best solution, IMO.

nGrams* surprisingly (to me anyway) shows the plural being favored (over 
2:1 in 1980), but getting closer (9:8 in 2007). British English favors the 
plural more. Fiction favors it less, to the point of being in the minority 
for a couple years in the early 2000s. I don't know what types of books are 
missing from these corpuses (corpii? :) ) though. Like other respondents, I 
have the sense that current IT literature favors the mass noun.

* 
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=data+is%2Cdata+are%2Cdata+does%2Cdata+do&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1970&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cdata%20is%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bdata%20is%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BData%20is%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cdata%20are%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bdata%20are%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BData%20are%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cdata%20does%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bdata%20does%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BData%20does%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cdata%20do%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bdata%20do%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BData%20do%3B%2Cc0


--
Alan Mintz <Alan_Mintz+TZ_IANA at Earthlink.net>



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