To follow up on my last post regarding when to use “fewer” and when to use “less,” let’s briefly discuss when to use “much” and when to use “many.” Although the latter two seem to be confused far less frequently than the former two (largely because we seem to have an inherent sense of which one simply “sounds right”), people still sometimes mix them up.
Use “much” with singular nouns and “many” with plural nouns. For example, you didn’t eat much cereal, but you did eat many muffins. “Cereal” is a singular, mass noun, whereas “muffins” is a plural noun. There is one box or one bowl of cereal, but there are several muffins.
You would ask, “How much chicken did he eat?”, but “How many eggs did he eat?” (This would be different, of course, if you were dealing with an extremely hungry person, in which case, you might actually need to ask, “How many chickens did he eat?”)
You can talk about how much milk you drank, but how many cookies you dipped into it. You might describe how many sundaes you ate, but how much ice cream.
(Side note: Apparently, I am the aforementioned extremely hungry person. I started this post with breakfast examples, moved on to dinner, and followed with dessert–not deliberately! For more examples of how to correctly use “much” and “many,” click through the slideshow of (food!) photos below.)
For further explanation of the relationship between “less”/”fewer” and “much”/”many,” click here.
Hey! Unrelated… If the person’s name ends in s, say Frances, which is the correct possessive, Frances’ or Frances’s?
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Hi! So this is always a point of contention, but the consensus seems to be that if you PRONOUNCE the extra “s” in the possessive, then you use an apostrophe “s.” For example, if you would say “James-is,” you would use “James’s.” If, even with the possessive, you would still say “James,” you would use “James’.” I hope that helps a little.
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Thanks Amanda. That would be my instinctive choice. Seems this one isn’t set in stone.
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