20 Tricky Situation: Collective Nouns

Sometimes we use a singular noun to describe a group of things. Words like flock, group, audience, team all describe multiple people/animals/things collected in one big unit. We call those collective nouns.

So, when we’re choosing a verb, should we choose singular or plural? The answer is — it depends.

The question we ask ourselves is this: is the group acting as one unit, or are all the individual parts of the group doing their own thing? Let’s look at a few examples to demonstrate the process.

The team (wins/win) nearly every game.

You might already have an instinctual answer for which verb you’d choose here, but let’s go through the process. I see the collective noun team in here. So, are the members of the team all doing the same thing together here? I would say they are — it’s not possible for some of them to win and not others. The team either wins or loses, and they all do it together, so we treat team as a singular noun:

The team wins nearly every game.

Now let’s examine another sentence.

The hotel staff (is/are) working to complete all their daily tasks.

In this sentence, we’ve got that collective noun staff. Now I ask myself whether all the members of the staff are working at the same task together, or doing their own separate thing.

I picture all the people doing their own separate thing. Some might be cleaning rooms, while others check the reservations or stock the vending machines. So we’re talking about multiple people doing multiple tasks: we need to use the plural verb here.

The hotel staff are working to complete all their daily tasks.

What About Company Names?

When the subject of a verb is a company name, we use singular verbs, even if the name sounds like it’s plural. Sometimes, to make sure I’m doing it right, I like to mentally replace the name of the company with the pronoun it or the phrase the company.

Nintendo is selling the Switch 2 in North America.

Starbucks sells coffee on every street corner.

Before we close this chapter, let’s get some practice making verbs agree when the subject is a collective noun.