The team are - Collective nouns in British English

'Our team are playing really well today'

That sentence is absolutely standard in British English, but unusual, 'ungrammatical' even, to American ears. The word team denotes a group of people, and is usually referred to as a collective noun. The standard position amongst grammarians and usage guide writers is that you can use either a singular or plural verb with a collective noun.

There is a difference, however, between American and British usage. While Americans will practically always use a singular verb, British speakers will often use a plural verb, something some people find hard to accept.

During the course of a (let's say lively) discussion on this topic on a language forum, I collected quite a lot of quotes from, and links to, various grammar books, style guides and commentators on English, so I thought it might be useful to gather them all here.

In no sense am I trying to persuade people to use plural verbs with collective nouns: that is your choice. My aim here is just to try and convince people that this usage has a long history and is entirely legitimate.

It's a boy!

Transatlantic pronoun problems

I was writing some example sentences for my post on lay and lie, when I wrote this sentence:

She wrapped the baby up and laid it in its cot.

Then I remembered a post I'd read recently on the excellent language blog Separated by a common language. The blogger is an American linguist, who is currently working at a British university and writes about the differences between British and American English. And the penny has just dropped that Lynne Guist is not in fact her real name. What an idiot I am!

Anyway apparently it's quite normal for Brits to call very young babies it, as I had done there without even thinking, and Americans find this somewhat shocking. So, not wanting to offend anyone's sensibilities, I changed it to him and its to his.

Then for some light relief from 'lay and lie', which was involving quite a lot of work, I 'popped over' to 'Newsroom 101' to do a quiz or two, as you do. Newsroom 101 is not run by Associated Press, but has lots of quizzes based on Associated Press rules. I don't take them too seriously, but it's quite fun trying to guess how their minds work. Well, I came across these sentences:

Video vocabulary quiz and a look at some collective nouns

A recent post (Let's not call a spade a spade) included the expression ‘to know someone in the biblical sense’, meaning to have a sexual relationship with them. This expression is informal and is usually used humorously. In a sketch from the British TV comedy show ‘Not the nine o clock news’, 'Gerald the gorilla', there is a rather more obvious variation - ‘to live with someone in the biblical sense’, with the same meaning.

What on earth is a 'a congregation of crocodiles'. We take a look at the strange world of collective nouns.