Friday, July 30, 2010

Usage in English

In English, the word datum is still used in the general sense of "something given". In cartography,geography, nuclear magnetic resonance and technical drawing it is often used to refer to a single specific reference datum from which distances to all other data are measured. Any measurement or result is a datum, but data point is more common,[1] albeit tautological. Both datums (see usage indatum article) and the originally Latin plural data are used as the plural of datum in English, but data is more commonly treated as a mass noun and used with a verb in the singular form, especially in day-to-day usage. For example, This is all the data from the experiment. This usage is inconsistent with the rules of Latin grammar and traditional English (These are all the data from the experiment). Even when a very small quantity of data is referred to (One number, for example) the phrase piece of data is often used, as opposed to datum.

Many style guides[2] and international organizations, such as the IEEE Computer Society,[3] allow usage of data as either a mass noun or plural based on author preference. Other professional organizations and style guides[4] require that authors treat data as a plural noun. The Air Force Flight Test Center, specifically states that the word data is always plural, never singular.[5]

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