Plural
The
plural, in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical category of number. Plural forms of nouns typically denote a quantity other than the default quantity represented by a noun, which is generally one. Most commonly, therefore, plurals are used to denote two or more of something, although they may also denote fractional, zero or negative amounts. An example of a plural is the English word
cats, which corresponds to the singular
cat. Plurality is a linguistic universal, represented variously among the languages as a separate word, an affix, or by other morphological indications such as stress or implicit markers/context. Words of other types, such as verbs, adjectives and pronouns, also frequently have distinct plural forms, which are used in agreement with the number of their associated nouns. Some languages also have a dual or other systems of number categories. However, in English and many other languages, singular and plural are the only grammatical numbers, except for possible remnants of the dual in pronouns such as
both and
either.