In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity (i.e., grammatical number) representing a value of ''greater-than-one". [3] [4] [5] [6]

Typically applied to nouns, a plural word or marker (morpheme) is used to distinguish a value other than the default quantity of a noun, which is typically one. Plurality is a linguistic universal, represented variously among the languages as a separate word (free morpheme), an affix (bound morpheme), or by other morphological indications such as stress or implicit markers/context.

In the English language, singular and plural are the only usual grammatical numbers, with minor dual exceptions ("both", "either", etc.) A plural is commonly abbreviated pl. in dictionaries. In part-of-speech tagging it has other notation which distinguish different types of plurals based on the grammatical and semantic context.

In English, the plural is usually formed with the addition of -s (e.g., one cat, two cats; one chair, two chairs) or -es (e.g., one bush, two bushes; one itch, two itches). Generally, -s is added to all nouns that end in a voiceless consonant, vowels, or voiced non-sibilants, whereas -es is added for nouns ending in a sibilant sound. Nouns that end in e are a noted exception; though e may form a sibilant sound, -s is used (e.g.,. one tree, two trees; one bee, two bees).

John Hamilton McWhorter V (1965– ) is an American linguist and political commentator. He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. His research specialties are how creole languages form and how language grammars change as the result of sociohistorical phenomena.

McWhorter was born and raised in Philadelphia. He attended Friends Select School in Philadelphia, and after tenth grade was accepted to Simon's Rock College, where he earned an A.A. degree. Later, he attended Rutgers University and received a B.A. in French in 1985. He received a master's degree in American Studies from New York University and a Ph.D. in linguistics in 1993 from Stanford University.

After graduation McWhorter was an associate professor of linguistics at Cornell University from 1993 to 1995 before taking up a position as associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1995 until 2003. He left that position to become a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. From 2006 to 2008 he was a columnist for the New York Sun. He is Contributing Editor at The New Republic and The Root.com, writes a biweekly column at The New York Daily News and also writes regularly for Rupert Murdoch's The Daily. Since 2008, he has been a lecturer in linguistics, American Studies, and the Core Curriculum at Columbia University.