| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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3. Word Choice: New Uses, Common Confusion, and Constraints
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| § 88. data |
| The word data is the plural of Latin datum, “something given,” but does that mean you should treat it as a plural noun in English? Not always. The plural usage is still common enough, as this headline from the New York Times attests: Data Are Elusive on the Homeless. Sometimes scientists think of data as plural, as in These data do not support the conclusions. But more often scientists and researchers think of data as a singular mass entity like information, and most people now follow this in general usage. Sixty percent of the Usage Panel accepts the use of data with a singular verb and pronoun in the sentence Once the data is in, we can begin to analyze it. A still larger number, 77 percent, accepts the sentence We have very little data on the efficacy of such programs, where the quantifier very little, which is not used with similar plural nouns such as facts or results, implies that data here is indeed singular. | 1 |
| When plural, data has the unusual characteristic of not being capable of modification by cardinal numbers. You may have various data but you will never have five or ten data. | 2 |
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| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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