• Ephera
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    952 months ago

    As Wiktionary puts it:

    The word data is more often used as an uncountable noun with a singular verb than as a plural noun with singular datum.

    It’s like “hair”. You can hold a single ‘hair’, you can also hold three hairs. But if you’re looking at an entire mane, you ain’t counting, so it’s referred to as “hair” again.

    • @[email protected]
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      152 months ago

      Yeah, but for example, IEEE conference paper templates explicitly state “The word ‘data’ is plural, not singilar”. So if you use it with a singular verb you will receive this post in an email and you can only say thank you and change it.

    • @tulliandar
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      22 months ago

      And the word “data” is only one word, so “data is plural”

        • @tulliandar
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          22 months ago

          The noun I’m referring to is the word “data” not the data themselves. “Data data” is 2 words, “data” is one word. The word (singular) “data” is plural

          • @[email protected]
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            -22 months ago

            In Latin, sure. But the word “datum” isn’t a part of English, so we have instead the uncountable noun “data” which is derived from the Latin.