# Subject/Verb agreement for Labia

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subject-verb-agreement-for-labia/332242>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [November 22, 2005, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subject-verb-agreement-for-labia/332242 "2005-11-22T15:00:10Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Nimue](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/d26b3c/32.png) [@Nimue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nimue)\
**Post date:** [November 23, 2005, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subject-verb-agreement-for-labia/332242/21 "2005-11-23T16:14:08Z")

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> [@Polycarp](#):
>
> At the risk of offending **samclem** for witticisms instead of staid answers, may I offer the suggestion that labia will always agree with bilingual fricatives. 🙂

Hmm, I think that would tickle. Let’s try a rapid series of interdental plosives, instead. Voiceless, if you please.  
(Btw, I was taught _bilabial_, as opposed to _bilingual_, as well. Not to nitpick.)

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**Author:** ![Excalibre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/898d66/32.png) [@Excalibre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Excalibre)\
**Post date:** [November 23, 2005, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/subject-verb-agreement-for-labia/332242/22 "2005-11-23T17:28:54Z")

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> [@bienville](#):
>
> See that’s the tricky part.
> 
> Although I personally think of labia as plural, referring distinctly to each individual “labium” (a word which no one uses ever), is it also possible that labia has become a singular- but a _collective_ noun, at once referring to all the dangly bits grouped together as a unit???

That seems to be a common pattern with these Latin plurals. If the plural is used far more often than the singular (as with _data_ and _datum_), but the plural appears not to have any plural morphology (as in, it doesn’t end in _-s_ as native English plurals do), it makes sense for it to be reanalyzed as a singular mass noun. Which is probably the prevailing usage of _data_ today - “the data is corrupt”, “an important piece of data”, &c are more common than the etymologically correct “the data are corrupt” and “an important datum”. The singular in particular seems almost unused. _Media_ is a similar example, although in that case the plural and singular seem more to have developed into independent words (_medium_ in reference to, for instance, a particular form of art, is alive and well, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it pluralized as _mediums_) while _media_ is a mass noun referring to the press in general and occasionally is even pluralized again to _medias_ (though that grates on many people’s ears, including mine.)

Most of these words are second declension neuter nouns in Latin, with the ending _-UM_ in the nominative singular and _-A_ in the nominative plural. Even in the Romance languages, a similar process reanalyzing the neuter plurals into singular mass nouns is fairly common. For instance, Latin _OVUM_, plural _OVA_ essentially split into two separate words in some of the Romance languages; each of the words underwent the various phonetic processes that all Latin words underwent, and in modern Italian the results are _uovo_ and _uova_. _Uovo_, because of its _-o_ ending, has been reanalyzed as a masculine singular, and is the basic term for “egg”. _Uova_ is also understood as a singular, but feminine because of its ending, and it means “roe” and functions as a mass noun (as do “roe” and “caviar” in English, of course.)

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