Answer: "The living are/is in trouble"? Would "the livings" be correct?

[chomiji]

An anonymous reader had a question for us about the use of the term "the living" and whether it takes a singular or plural form of the verb. Let's take a look!

Comments

[badtzphoto]

Awesome, I've always wondered, now I understand the usage in different cases. Thank you.

[daegaer]

This is one of the places where US and British and Irish Englishes can differ - in British and Hiberno-English it's fine to say things like "the team is unhappy, " for example. Plural verbs are generally used with collective nouns, but something like "team", "group", etc isn't a collective noun and would tend to attract singular verbs to itself.