Uncountable Nouns

When I’m giving IELTS writing corrections, I often tell people that they have made a mistake with an uncountable noun. This is hardly surprising. These can be really tricky to learn. In fact, some nouns that are usually countable can even become uncountable in certain situations!

As such, I want to teach you all about uncountable nouns today. This is a big topic, so it will be a long article, but it is an important part of English grammar that all learners should understand.

What are Uncountable Nouns?

We can divide nouns into two categories: countable and uncountable. Those that are countable can be counted. For example:

Book (one book, two books, many books)
Dog (one dog, two dogs, many dogs)

However, some nouns are uncountable. These cannot be counted:

Time
Money
Space

Whenever you learn a new noun, you should check a dictionary to see whether it is countable or not. It should look like this:

Here, you can see the arrow points to the letter C, which means this noun is countable. If it says U, it will be an uncountable noun.

What Types of Nouns are Uncountable?

An uncountable noun is one that cannot be counted and cannot take “a” or “an” before it. There are many examples, including common words like “advice.” You could never say “an advice” or “three advices.” Therefore, it is an uncountable noun.

Here are some categories of uncountable nouns:

Abstract concepts (Buddhism, communism, spirituality, peace, capitalism, freedom)
Energy (heat, light, electricity, power, cold, radiation)
Feelings (love, happiness, sadness, contentment, bliss, hunger)
Gas (oxygen, carbon dioxide, helium, air, smog)
Group names for things (furniture, equipment, baggage)
Liquids (beer, milk, juice, water, whisky, oil)
States of being (fatigue, sleep, exhaustion, childhood, adulthood)
Subjects (literature, history, geography, maths, chemistry, biology)
Weather (rain, sun, snow, sleet, hail, humidity, wind)

As you can see, there are many types of uncountable noun.

Can a Noun be Both Countable and Uncountable?

A word can be both countable and uncountable but, importantly, its meaning changes a little, so it is not exactly the same word. For example:

She drank some water.
Can you give me a water?

In the first example, water is used as an uncountable noun. It has no plural form, so we say “some water.” This is by far the most common use.

However, in the second example, it is a countable noun. This is because it refers to “a bottle of water” (ie a countable unit). We sometimes turn uncountable nouns into countable ones when that thing can be divided up into units.

Here’s another example:

He doesn’t drink beer.
She ordered two beers.

You can see that it is again used with a liquid substance. We can do the same with “milk” and “juice” and “whisky,” etc. They are uncountable nouns but, when we think of them as individual glasses or bottles, they can be countable as well.

It is not only liquids that this applies to:

I’m getting my hair cut tomorrow.
Gross! I found a hair in my soup!

In the first example, we consider all the hairs on someone’s head as a single unit called “hair.” In the second, we consider each individual hair as a countable unit.

How to Use Uncountable Nouns

The most important rule is that uncountable nouns should not be counted. Thus, we cannot use a number in front of them and we do not add “-s” at the end to pluralise them:

INCORRECT: two informations
CORRECT: some information
INCORRECT: five knowledges
CORRECT: a lot of knowledge
INCORRECT: ten equipments
CORRECT: lots of equipment

Likewise, we do not use “a” or “an” before these words:

INCORRECT: I was hoping to get an advice about my career.
CORRECT: I was hoping to get some advice about my career.

Instead, we have other phrases we use with uncountable nouns.

Quantity Expressions for Uncountable Nouns

You can see from my examples above that we have a few words that we can use to suggest a quantity in relation to uncountable nouns. There are various words and phrases that can be used:

some
lots / a lot of
a great deal of
plenty of
a little
not much

For negative sentences, we use “any”:

We don’t have any bread.
I don’t have any time right now.

Likewise, there are specific expressions that can be used for certain uncountable nouns. For example:

I’m going to the bakery to buy a loaf of bread.

The word “bread” is uncountable, but actually we can count it by making it into a specific countable unit, a loaf. Example:

The shop sold twenty-six loaves of bread.
I’ve got a loaf of bread in the cupboard.

Of course, there are many such words. Here are some more examples:

A piece of advice
A bar of chocolate
Two bottles of water
A mode of transport
A piece of equipment
An item of news

You need to have a good grasp of these common collocations if you want to get a good score for Lexical Resource.

Can you Count Uncountable Nouns?

As we just saw, it is possible to count uncountable nouns if we use certain units to measure them. Of course, not all uncountable nouns can be treated this way, and most of them have unique words or phrases that are used to make them countable.

For example, we can say:

Lightning can be dangerous.
He was hit by a bolt of lightning.

In the first example, “lightning” is an idea, a concept. In the second, it is a physical thing that has a real presence. Importantly, the unit “a bolt of” means it is suddenly countable. We could say, for example: