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A month ago, I asked if we should prefer singular or plural in tag names. Plural seems to come out as the clear favourite among those who have any opinion on the matter.

Therefore, I'd like to request that at least the following tags are batch retagged (with corresponding tag synonyms) to plural form: verb -> verbs, etc. 

verb
word 
synonym
pronoun 
preposition
article 
accent
proper-noun
adjective 
neologism
number
modal-verb
...

(That's from the first page of the tag list; I probably missed some, and there are more on the subsequent pages.)

Probably these too, eh?

idiom
phrase 
expression

Thanks!

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  • Actually, I find accent to be an interesting one; to me, accents and accent are two different tags dealing with two different things. Accents is talking about different types of accents — Southern, West Coast, Scottish, etc. On the other hand, accent would refer to the notion of accent in general. Does anyone else feel that this is a valid distinction? (Valid from the standpoint of tag usefulness, more than anything else...)
    – Kosmonaut
    Sep 11, 2010 at 18:43
  • 1
    Actually, I feel this distinction is even more important for numbers vs. number. One deals with 1, 2, 3... and the other deals with grammatical number and how it is expressed in English (e.g. number agreement in verbs). But is this distinction useful for readers in general?
    – Kosmonaut
    Sep 11, 2010 at 18:51
  • @Kosmonaut, I included accents as dialects was already in plural... But admittedly I did stop to think in both of those cases and wasn't too sure. The distinctions you mention might be useful, but in practice I'm a bit doubtful if majority of users will ever recognise and appreciate them...
    – Jonik
    Sep 11, 2010 at 19:10
  • @Jonik: I agree that you may be completely right about that — the only thing that really concerns me is that, e.g., accent can technically refer to both notions of accent that I mentioned, whereas accents can only refer to types of accents. I wonder if we suddenly stumbled upon a good reason to use all singulars instead? (I really hesitate to say this since I have just gone through and updated a bunch of tags :)
    – Kosmonaut
    Sep 11, 2010 at 19:18
  • @Kosmonaut: Heh, perhaps. :) But I'd say let's go with plural for now, in most cases at least. If that proves to be too problematic, we can always change the policy (& retag again) later.
    – Jonik
    Sep 11, 2010 at 23:44
  • @Jonik: I agree... that is probably the most reasonable thing to do for now.
    – Kosmonaut
    Sep 12, 2010 at 0:35
  • Marking this long ago complete thanks to @Kosmonaut.
    – tchrist Mod
    Sep 11, 2016 at 16:24

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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If there are no objections, I will do this.

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  • no objections here
    – nohat Mod
    Sep 11, 2010 at 17:30
  • @Kosmonaut - you guys do have access to the automated retag tools, right? It appears (from your recent edits) as if you're retagging manually...
    – Jonik
    Sep 11, 2010 at 19:05
  • @Jonik: Unless there is another way to do this that I don't know of, there must be at least one question with the plural form of the tag in order to apply the batch merge. So I retagged one post with the plural tag in each case where one did not exist yet.
    – Kosmonaut
    Sep 11, 2010 at 19:14
  • Ah, right. I've never used the moderation tools so I wasn't aware. :)
    – Jonik
    Sep 11, 2010 at 23:35
  • You missed phrase, eh? And one case where plural seems odd to me is, well, plurals (wouldn't singular and plural work the best in tags?). Anyway, thanks for retagging!
    – Jonik
    Sep 21, 2010 at 12:50
  • You are probably right about plural. I will also change phrase.
    – Kosmonaut
    Sep 21, 2010 at 13:01
  • Hmm... should there be a difference between phrases and phrasing (like, "how should this sentence be phrased" vs. "how is this phrase used")?
    – Kosmonaut
    Sep 21, 2010 at 13:07

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