The word data is plural not singular

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The word data is most often used as a singular mass noun in educated everyday usage.^[1][2] However, due to the history of the word, considerable controversy has existed on whether it should be considered a mass noun used with verbs conjugated in the singular, or should be treated as the plural of the now-rarely-used datum.

Usage in English[edit]

In one sense, data is the plural form of datum. Datum actually can also be a count noun with the plural datums (see usage in datum article) that can be used with cardinal numbers (e.g., «80 datums»); data (originally a Latin plural) is not used like a normal count noun with cardinal numbers and can be plural with such plural determiners as these and many or as a mass noun with a verb in the singular form.^[3]
Even when a very small quantity of data is referenced (one number, for example), the phrase piece of data is often used, as opposed to datum. The debate over appropriate usage continues,^[4][5][6] but «data» as a singular form is far more common.^[7]

In English, the word datum is still used in the general sense of «an item given». In cartography, geography, nuclear magnetic resonance and technical drawing, it is often used to refer to a single specific reference datum from which distances to all other data are measured. Any measurement or result is a datum, though data point is now far more common.^[8]

Data is indeed most often used as a singular mass noun in educated everyday usage.^[9][10] Some major newspapers, such as The New York Times, use it either in the singular or plural. In The New York Times, the phrases «the survey data are still being analyzed» and «the first year for which data is available» have appeared within one day.^[11] The Wall Street Journal explicitly allows this usage in its style guide.^[12]
The Associated Press style guide classifies data as a collective noun that takes the singular when treated as a unit but the plural when referring to individual items (e.g., «The data is sound» and «The data have been carefully collected»).^[13]

In scientific writing, data is often treated as a plural, as in These data do not support the conclusions, but the word is also used as a singular mass entity like information (e.g., in computing and related disciplines).^[14] British usage now widely accepts treating data as singular in standard English,^[15] including everyday newspaper usage^[16] at least in non-scientific use.^[17] UK scientific publishing still prefers treating it as a plural.^[18] Some UK university style guides recommend using data for both singular and plural use,^[19] and others recommend treating it only as a singular in connection with computers.^[20] The IEEE Computer Society allows usage of data as either a mass noun or plural based on author preference,^[21] while IEEE in the editorial style manual indicates to always use the plural form.^[22] Some professional organizations and style guides^[23] require that authors treat data as a plural noun. For example, the Air Force Flight Test Center once stated that the word data is always plural, never singular.^{[24][full citation needed]}

References[edit]

The answer is – both.

The word “data” is a Latin word. It is the plural of “datum”.

“Data” means facts or information; “datum” means one fact or a single item of information.

“Data” and “datum” are usually used to refer to statistical information or information subject to analysis.

“Data” is used far more commonly than “datum” and in a wider range of contexts.

“Datum” is unlikely to appear outside of specialist scientific or academic writing.

As “data” is a plural countable noun in Latin, many people take the view that it should be used in the same way in English. Thus it requires plural verb forms, pronouns and quantifiers, e.g.:

Many of those data have already been entered into the system.
When we have received the data we can start to analyse them.
There are very few data in the set.

This usage is practical for scientific or academic writing because it allows for the use of the singular “datum”.

However, it is increasingly common to use “data” as a singular uncountable noun, as follows:

Much of that data has already been entered into the system.
When we have received the data we can start to analyse it.
There is very little data in the set.

This usage doesn’t really allow for the use of the singular “datum”, so may lack precision in certain contexts.

Usage of “data” as a singular uncountable noun – in the same way as “information” – is now generally accepted in everyday English, so much so that using the word as a plural countable noun can sound incorrect. However, in much scientific and academic writing, where precision is obviously more important, it still tends to be used as a plural countable noun.

It is your choice how to use it in business or legal writing. My preference would be – as always – to use the everyday English version – “data is” – and that is increasingly the preference of contemporary grammarians. But your choice may depend on the context: if you’re writing a quick email to a native English speaker – use “data is”, or if you’re drafting a formal legal opinion on the results of a specific data analysis – use “data are”.

Also see my post on How to use the word “information”

This is intended as a clarification of the «correctness» of using data as a mass noun, for those strict-minded sticklers (there’s plenty of them) who might be unconvinced by Kosmonaut’s «languages borrow words and do whatever they want with them»:

1 — «Datum» and «data (plural)» are historically correct, so «data (mass noun)» must be wrong. How can «data» have a mass noun form as well as a singular and plural?
You’d never say «Oh, I spilled rice on the floor. Wait, it’s okay, I only
spilled 4 rices». There’s a separate noun phrase for the singular and
plural («grains of rice»).

Consider potato. It has a singular form, meaning one distinct root vegetable, a plural form, meaning multiple distinct root vegetables, and a mass form, meaning an amount of foodstuff made from potatoes. Imagine a dinner table, where each diner has a baked potato on their plate (singular), and everyone is sharing a platter of roast potatoes (plural) and a bowl of mashed potato (mass) (hopefully among other things…). If you ask someone to «pass the potato», they’ll understand that you mean the bowl of mass mash, not the tray of plural potatoes or the singular potato on their plate.

2 — There can be such a thing as «a datum» in a way which is not true
for «a water». Imagine someone looking at a database full of data and
saying, «There is so much data in this, I can’t see where to start».
Surely this is like standing in a migration of birds and saying «There
is so much bird in the sky, I can’t see the sun…»? Since data can be
countable, surely «data» can’t be primarily a mass noun?

Data is not necessarily countable. Data in a neat Excel sheet might have countable cells, but what about the data that is lost when photo editors talk about «data loss» when increasing the contrast of a digital photo made of binary machine code data? There’s no clear way of defining where one datum starts and the next one stops — would a datum in this context be a bit, a byte, or the data defining one pixel? Such a line would be arbitrary, like looking for units of rice in a processed flat rice cracker. It’s an amount measured in units of mass — 67kb of data in a jpg, 2 grams of rice in a rice cracker.

Even seemingly trivial cases aren’t so trivial. What’s one datum in a modern relational database? One value, one row? What about where there are table joins and foreign keys? Is a structural definition a datum? You can create a convention-specific definition, but it’s not a universal definition like one bird.

3 — Following that pattern, shouldn’t the mass noun of data be datum
(the singular), like how the mass noun of potatoes is potato?

No. It’s rare, but not completely unique, for a count noun to develop from a plural, in cases where the singular over time becomes less and less universally meaningful. «Physics» used to mean the set of countable, defined, distinct natural sciences — until the field developed such that it became clear that the lines between one physic and another wasn’t as sharp or universal as previously thought.

You could answer «What’s happening at CERN?» with «A lot of physics», but you wouldn’t expect the reply «How many?». This is because there’s no longer a clear established universal dividing line between one physic and another. Your answer would interpret the question as, «How much?» and would be a measurement of amount: «Enough to occupy 4,000 physicists». In the same way, you could answer «What does this supercomputer store?» with «A lot of data», but the reply «How many?» would incorrectly assume that all data has one clear common countable unit and that there is a clear universal dividing line between one datum and another across all contexts. Even if this data did happen to have a consistent countable convention, replying «7 million data» would be ambiguous unless the asker already knew this convention. A more useful answer would be to interpret it as «How much?» and give an answer in terms of a measurement of amount: «Nearly 220 petabytes».