10 Commonly Confused Uncountable Nouns

Do you sometimes have trouble with uncountable nouns? Watch our short video below or read through this lesson to learn about uncountable nouns and how to minimize your mistakes when using uncountable nouns.  

 So what are uncountable nouns anyway? The Macmillan Dictionary defines it as: 

• a noun that has no plural form and that usually refers to abstract things such as “advice”, “luck”, and “information”, or to substances such as “milk”, “blood”, and “smoke”.

​The Cambridge Dictionary says that an uncountable noun is: 

• a noun that has one form with no plural and names (or identifies) something that there can be more or less of but that cannot be counted: "Heat" is an uncountable noun.

In other words, uncountable nouns refer to abstract things and substances that we cannot count because they don't have separate elements.

The thing is, it may be easier for an English learner to imagine abstract things as uncountable nouns but there are tricky nouns as well in English that refer to concrete things but are still uncountable, like for example, the noun 'garbage'. You will encounter some nouns like this in our list.

The two definitions of uncountable nouns mentioned above give us an idea of what we need to remember with regard to uncountable nouns, also called non-count nouns or mass nouns. Let us review these points below:

1. Uncountable nouns have NO PLURAL FORM--they are NOT changed into plural form by adding [s]. For instance, we can't say "milks, bloods, smokes, rices, knowledges," and so on.  To quantify uncountable nouns and make them countable, we have to use measure words and expressions of quantity such as a lot of, a little, a piece of, a bag of, a box of, and so on. 
2. Uncountable nouns are used with singular verbs.
3. We cannot use a/an or numbers directly with them. 

Remembering these rules will greatly reduce errors when using uncountable nouns. ​

10 Commonly Confused Uncountable Nouns
Let's us now look at our list of ten commonly confused uncountable nouns. Please note that these ten words are just a few of the many uncountable nouns that cause errors among English learners. For this reason, it is likely that there will be a follow up of this video presenting another list of problematic uncountable nouns. 

1. information - Even when you are talking about boxes and boxes of files and data, we should still say "information" and not "informations." Examples: 

• There was a lot of confusing information on social media before the government made the official announcement.
• The article proposes that we are consuming too much information. 

2. equipment / machinery - Somebody who has a roomful of tools, or even a yardful of tools, has plenty of equipment or machinery, not "equipments" or "machineries". Examples:

• Most of the equipment was donated by private companies.
• Miscellaneous broken equipment is piled in this corner. 
• We keep most of the noisy machinery at the very back of the warehouse. 

3. research - Journals, books, all sorts of academic papers, interviews, experiments -- all of these can be classified as research, but not "researches." Examples:

• Recent research published by two different groups seems to support this theory. 
• She has done a lot of research on this subject  that she has become our resident expert. 

4. trash/garbage/rubbish - We unfortunately generate too much trash that one day, the earth may drown in trash, but when that happens, we would still not refer to it as "trashes", just trash. In American English, 'garbage' and 'trash' are usually used while in British English, 'rubbish' is the more common word to refer to things that are thrown away.  Examples:

• With the landfill no longer usable, the city is trying to figure out a way to deal with its garbage.
• The volunteers collected a lot of trash along the river bank. 

5. evidence - The Oxford English Dictionary notes that "In general English, evidence is always uncountable. However, in academic English, the plural evidences is sometimes used such as in the sentence, 'The cave contained evidences of prehistoric settlement.'"
Since we are mostly talking about everyday English, then we would use evidence as uncountable 99% of the time. 
We would, for example, say pieces of evidence, a lot of evidence, or little evidence. We would never say two evidences or many evidences. Examples:

• Investigators claim to have found an enormous amount of evidence. 
• There was evidence that the package has been tampered with.

6. advice - There is bad advice, terrible advice, as well as prudent advice that we don't want to listen to because we just want to do something our own way. There are people who give unsolicited advice and there are likely more who don't want to be on the receiving end of it. Whichever kind of advice you are getting, remember never to say "advices". 
Examples: 

• That is the best piece of advice I have ever heard from a stranger. 
• Can you give me advice on how to proceed with this huge project? 

7. stuff - What kind of stuff do you collect? Clothes? Vintage toys? Handbags? Art? Memories? There are many things that fall under the definition of stuff, which is a word we use to refer to things, abstract or concrete, without mentioning the thing itself. No matter how much stuff you have, we will always use the singular form "stuff" and not "stuffs".
Examples:

• Where do you want me to put all this stuff? 
• I put your art stuff in the basement because I need to clear this room for our guest. 
• What did you talk about all morning? > Oh, we just talked about sports stuff, that's all. 

8. furniture - You'd think that furniture is a countable noun given that we can count individual pieces of chairs, tables, beds and couches, right? Unfortunately, that's not the case. Think of furniture as a word that collectively refers to all the furnishings in a house and thereby, we cannot say one furniture or even ten "furnitures". 
Examples:

• The apartment was tastefully decorated with minimalist furniture. 
• As he only expects to stay for a year, he is planning to just buy inexpensive furniture. 

9. luggage - Do you travel light or do you usually bring the kitchen sink? However way you like to travel, everything you bring with you will simply be called luggage, never "luggages". 
Examples:

• I had forgotten to bring in my luggage from the driveway. As a result, all three bags got drenched in the rain. 
• The airline can't explain how all my luggage ended up in Hawaii.  

10. jewelry - Just like 'furniture', jewelry seems to refer to individual pieces but whether you are talking about just one ring or a chest full of treasures, both will be referred to simply as jewelry and not "jewelries". By the way, jewelry is the American spelling while the British spell it as 'jewellery'. 
Examples:

• Exquisite pieces of jewelry from the princess's collection will be put on display. 
• Jewelry worth thousands of dollar is missing from the safe. 

Please feel free to leave a comment if you have questions and share this lesson if you found it useful. 

Image credits:
​trash - photo created by jcomp - www.freepik.com
​luggage - Photo created by jcomp - www.freepik.com