Can information be plural? (i.e. "informations")

To my understanding, “information” is a “mass noun”, like “air” or “water”. You don’t pluralize those. Instead, when you use a mass noun, you’re referring by default to the entity as a whole; to refer to some part of it, you apply a (possibly fuzzy) unit of measurement, like “cubic foot of air”, “all the air”, “some water”, or “too much water”.

So just as you wouldn’t say “all the airs” or “some of the waters”, you normally wouldn’t say something like “lots of informations”.

In other words: it looks odd because it’s incorrect usage, and your instincts are telling you so. :)

Only if it’s data. ;)

@jasonjackson – thanks, that’s what I thought :)

@laureth – this probably sounds stupid, but… When isn’t information data?

We just talked about this in my linguistics class yesterday. Speakers of East Asian languages who try to learn English say words like ‘mails’ and ‘furnitures’ because they don’t understand this concept. Jason is right about these being mass nouns.

@Vincentt: The singular of “data” is “datum.”

Ergo, when information is data, it’s plural. :D

What about different types of information, though? Fish is plural for fish, and fishes is used to describe multiple groups of fish. Similarly, people is used to describe a group of persons, and peoples is used to describe multiple groups of people.

Can informations be used to describe multiple, distinct types of information? I’m guessing no, but I feel like it ought to, based on rules for other words.

How would you describe many groups of deer?

you can’t use “informations”. instead use “a lot of information”, “a few information”, etc etc.

Whoa, laureth…data…groan…

Many groups of deer? Bambises?

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In regards to the Topic: Merriam Webster considers the two synonymous.
I would never use it, but hey

this question makes me think about my hate for the words “peoples”, “monies” and “fishes”. fishes actually makes sense and has a diff meaning than multiple fish, but it still bothers me

@wenbert: “A few information” doesn’t sound right.

Yeah, massive nouns CAN have plural forms, like @fieryspoon indicated. There are different types of grasses, the sea is filled with many fishes. I guess, hypothetically, “informations” could describe multiple sets of information grouped together. I’ve never heard it, though.

Also, prosecutors file informations(formal_criminal_charge) all the time!

If you’re George Bush you could probably get away with saying that.

“Many waters cannot quench love.” “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept.”

I think if you’re going to make grammatical claims about a word, you need to do so in a way that doesn’t conflict with long-established usage. Water is not a mass noun.

@wenbert and @girlofscience:

girlofscience is right. “A few information” doesn’t sound right because it isn’t! “Few” (and by association “fewer”) is a word that describes something that can be counted, i.e., not mass nouns. I have a few apples, but not a few food.

@cwilbur:

Water is commonly a mass noun. Yes, there are senses you can use water in, in which it is countified, but they are not the common sense of the word. There are a great many mass nouns that behave this way, but that doesn’t stop linguists from considering them mass nouns.

For reference.

OK, so information might perhaps be used plurally, but all those times I’ve seen it used it was just wrong :)

Still makes me wonder why I see it used this often though – and not always by people whose English is not that good…

@tonedef, in this case you cited about attorneys filing “informations”, the use of “information” would be a slang word for the document for formal_criminal_charge. One formal criminal charge would be “information” and since you can pluralize “charges” then you could say “informations” because “informations” means “formal criminal charges”.

Singular appears to be the norm, based upon a Google search.