Category talk:English countable nouns

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Deletion debate[edit]

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Category:English countable nouns[edit]

Has nobody ever noticed that these categories contain the exact same things? {{en-noun}} doesn't add either of these, so they're only added by {{countable}} and {{uncountable}}, which are only used when there are both of them, to distinguish which sense is which. --Yair rand 22:20, 24 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Delete countable. Excellent find. A relic of more naive days? I think it would make more sense to just have uncountable which ought to be less common. We also ought to have {{en-noun}} add to this only. It would be interesting to know if there are any nouns that are only in uncountable and those that are included by {{infl}}, which mostly don't have such countability indication. DCDuring TALK 23:04, 24 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Leaning towards a keep; we have other categories like [[Category:English uncomparable adjectives]] or English transitive verbs that serve no real purpose, but we keep them. If all categories of this nature in all languages were proposed as well I'd be happier to support it. But I see no advantage of deleting it as of yet. Mglovesfun (talk) 23:15, 24 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Obviously, {{en-noun}} should be used to do this. Mglovesfun (talk) 08:05, 28 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
No input since April, kept for no consensus. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:49, 10 September 2010 (UTC)[reply]


RFD 2[edit]

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The very great majority of English nouns are countable (145,000 entries in category). This type of category should only exist for exceptional conditions (such as the English uncountable nouns). SemperBlotto (talk) 11:16, 29 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. —CodeCat 12:54, 1 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Why? --Yair rand (talk) 23:56, 1 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
As do I. Delete. This is a great example of the stupid excesses of categorisation. When this is deleted, as I hope it will be, somebody will also need to remove this feature from {{en-noun}}. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 23:43, 4 July 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. What’s next? Category:English regular verbs? — Ungoliant (Falai) 14:29, 31 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Keep. I visited this category today to find a countable noun which started with a 'd' for use in an alliterative title. This category is exactly what I was looking for, and I'm not aware of any alternatives for this information elsewhere on the web. Whether or not you find it personally useful or interesting, please be considerate and avoid deleting things that others may find useful. -NorsemanII (talk) 06:27, 20 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]


RFM discussion: October 2015–June 2016[edit]

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (permalink).

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And the same for "uncountable" and for all other languages. A fair proportion of nouns is categorised in these categories through context labels like "countable". In fact, it has been remarked by people over time that many entries only use this label to contrast countable and uncountable senses, so that both labels are used in the entry for different senses. Consequently, a disproportionate amount of the nouns in these categories may actually be both countable and uncountable. Therefore, I propose renaming these categories to better reflect how we actually use these terms, and to make better sense when it comes to context labels. It is also my hope that we can offload countability information from the headword line and into labels, but that's not the point of this proposal. —CodeCat 20:38, 14 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. If {{en-noun}} would automatically add nouns to one of the countability categories, then the disproportionality problem will be solved. And then I don't see a problem saying that a noun is both a countable noun and an uncountable noun, so there is no need to use this kind of circumlocutory language. --WikiTiki89 20:59, 14 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
{{en-noun}} can't determine whether nouns are countable or uncountable, if I understand what editors have said before. Apparently, lack of a plural is not a measure for uncountability; uncountable nouns seem to be a subset of nouns with no plural. —CodeCat 21:10, 14 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Not moved. - -sche (discuss) 00:13, 30 June 2016 (UTC)[reply]


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