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Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

Data is a plural of datum, if you're considering the individual pieces, but it's more commonly used (in my experience as a US native) as a collection singular like sand. Ex the sand has formed a hill, the data has filled the hard drive.

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I haven't heard the term "collection singular" before; I'd call that a mass noun or non-count noun. (Which I agree "data" has become.)

Mass noun is indeed the proper term, which I'll try to remember in the future. :)

We are reading a lovely article about how "childer" is a plural, and children is some sort of troubling double plural. The word data is somewhat older and its use has had even more time to change. I wish the dictionary would lose the fight on data and we could all just say "the data is conclusive" and be happy about it. It sounds much more natural.

In some contexts the plural of datum is datums, making it a bit more complicated than just a collective noun.

That's interesting. I've never encountered "datums" but a quick Google search turned up plenty of examples (like "Tidal Datums") and that "This plural is permissible only in the sense of 'fixed reference points'" [1].

Which contexts did you have in mind?

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/datums

Yes things like surveying and mapping was what I was thinking—similar.

dat- is the stem, I suppose, -um is a grammatical ending. Data simply suits the English ear better because it's close to the nominal suffix -er. How do you like this dater point?

One more datum and it'll blow!

And in the UK, Lego.

Lego is the brand name; "let's play with Lego" is short for "let's play with the Lego bricks". I think it's much closer to a group noun :)

See also: Meccano, Duplo, Brio, Scalextric.

LEGO(tm) brand bricks

In Germany we even stopped pretending that it's just a bunch of bricks and use the word as if it were the name of the game. We say "Let's play Lego". Does this sound strange in English?

You mean "not in the US"? Im not sure exactly, but only have heard people in US saying "Legos". (Australia here, we play with Lego!)

Totally opaque to whether that's "lego's" or "legos" and children in general probably don't care for an overzealous syntactic classification of single morphemes either.

Is "gimme the lego over there" strange? I think it is, and if it is, then it's an interesting dater point to support this hypothesis.

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