Correct, data is a plural. OP either doesn't know that or is making a more nuanced complaint about stodgy old style guides that used Latin to decide things like this.
Using "data" as if it were plural sounds odd to most English speakers. Some people insist that because it is technically the plural of datum (in Latin anyway) it has to take plural verbs. But what is technically correct is meaningless compared to what sounds correct. What sounds normal compared to what sounds odd is the only thing that really determines if a usage is correct or incorrect (unless writing in a context that mandates following a specific style guide).
"Data is" sounds correct to most people so it is correct, Latin be damned.
That usage would have been fine for the title regardless. Treating 'data' as a plural noun is annoyingly clumsy and should only be done if you're actually considering individual datums and need to refer to the whole. We don't treat 'information' as plural, don't do this to 'data' either.
The only people who treat data as plural are academics, usually social scientists, and overeducated journalists. Sentences like, "What do these data tell us?" are awkward for everyone else.
Like "information", "data" is correctly used as a singular mass noun.
To pile on the pedantry: "data" is one of those words that can be used in either a singular or plural construction. The OED has references going as far back as this one, from 1807:
W. IRVING Salmag. xviii. 366 My grandfather..took a data from his own excellent heart.
‘Data’ is the Latin plural, so the traditional prescriptivist advice to say ‘the data are’ is based on the assumption that the word is grammatically plural, not any argument about semantics. There are actually lots of grammatically plural nouns that are used to refer to things that can’t be split into discrete chunks. For example, while ‘the news’ in English has been reanalyzed as singular, it remains ‘las noticias’ in Spanish - without any implication that a specific number of discrete news items are being referred to.
While opinion is split on this, these days I don't think you can appeal to strictness alone to justify 'data' being plural, given the way usage has already gone. People (like me) who say 'data is...' are simply using data as a mass noun (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun), which seems to be a reasonable direction to be taking the language. I may be influenced by the fact that I usually see 'datum' used to refer to a reference point or marker in some arbitrary space, and thus in my mind is now another word separate from 'data' (albeit with shared etymology). If I had more than one datum, I'd call them 'datums', though I've yet to test how acceptable this would be in a formal setting.
> The word data can be either singular or plural depending on meaning and context. In general usage, data is treated as singular when used as a mass noun to mean “information” and as plural when used to mean “individual facts.” In scientific and academic writing, data is almost always used as a plural noun. In digital technology, data is usually treated as a singular mass noun to mean “digitally stored information.”
While it’s used interchangeably a lot, it’s also based on whether you have a scientific or CS background. My hunch is that the scientific plural usage will eventually largely die out except in very specific situations after a few generations given that software is eating the world.
From a random internet site:
"
The data are correct.
But most people treat 'data' as a singular noun, especially when talking about computers etc.
For example:-
The data is being transferred from my computer to yours.
And I have to be honest, I've never heard anyone ask for a datum.
"
It could be the case that the scientific pluralization is leaking into regular usage because more people are collectively reading / reporting on scientific studies. Alternatively, Google / Grammarly and similar tools might be suggesting it because it's been seen in their training data / examples.
In any case, IMHO 'datum' is a singular point of information, any reference to multiple points of information would make the noun plural.
The commentary is a subset of what's in the wonderful M-W "Concise Dictionary of English Usage." The entry for "data, datum" starts "The word data is a queer fish."
- data isn't an ordinary plural. "Ordinary plurals ... can be modified by cardinal numbers; ... no one, it seems, can tell you how many data."
- "To summarize, data has never been the plural of a count noun in English. It is used in two constructions - plural, with plural apparatus, and singular, as a mass noun, with singular apparatus. Both constructions are fully standard at any level of formality. The plural construction is more common. If you are an editor for a publisher whose house style insists on the plural construction only, take care to be consistent ..."
- "There have been more occurrences of datum in popular sources since [about the middle 1960s]. Perhaps the insistence of many editors that data is a plural has accelerated the tendency for datum to be used as a singular of data"
When I wrote that documentation (and comments in the code), I searched if "data" was singular or plural in English (which is not my mother tongue), because I had no idea what it was. According to the sources I found at that time, there were no clear definition, but it looked like to me it was mostly plural.
Yes! Like 'data' - it's singular ffs, so say 'the data in this paper shows' not 'the data show'. Looking at you TWiV!!
Maybe if it still makes sense semantically to replace 'data' with 'data points', then the plural is ok. However mostly we are talking about a 'wodge' of data, with discussion, caveats, etc, more than a simple list of 'datums'.
The "treating data as singular" one is interesting - "data" as a plural is actually one of my biggest pet peeves because I strongly suspect that realising that it is technically the plural of "datum" is the only reason people started using it like that. The actual concept it conveys is almost always not a plural: it's more like "sand" than "pebbles".
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