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Epi Wit & Wisdom Letters
Data Is or Data
Are? You Pick!
Do you spend a significant
portion of your professional life either a) trying to remember to use
a plural verb with data, or b) spotting singular verbs used by
colleagues and deriving excessive pleasure in pointing out these
incorrect uses? If so, this story is for you.
Recently, we prepared a
direct mail advertisement for EPISOURCE: A Guide to Resources in
Epidemiology. The flyer proclaimed—You Need This Book, Here’s the
Data.
A recipient of this ad wrote
back saying we should have stated—Here Are the Data. How could the Epi
Monitor make such an obvious mistake on a high visibility flyer to be
read by thousands? We rushed to our largest dictionary to check it
out.
It says: “Data is the plural
of the seldom used singular datum. Since its meaning is often
collective, referring to a group of facts as a unit, data is often
used with a singular verb in informal English. Formal English
continues to regard data as a plural rather than as a collective
noun.”
There’s the data. What do
you think?
Published February
1994
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