Is “All” Singular or Plural?
“All” is one of those words that can go either way. So look at the context!
Here’s an example of getting it wrong:
A handful of buildings and mining relics are all that remains today of the once-thriving mining town of Russell Gulch, Colorado.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/ghost-town-disc-golf
The writer got the sentence partly right. The sentence has a compound subject (“handful” and “relics”) and he used a plural main verb (“are” instead of “is”), but he used a singular verb in the noun clause (“all that remains”). Since “all” refers to more than one thing, it’s a plural, so the correct noun clause is “all that remain.”
Things like mass nouns (i.e. uncountable) are singular. You might say “all of the wheat is ground up,” for example.
So be careful with all that you write.
By the way, here’s a picture of some of the town, but not all of it.
thank you
so much
If the sentence were written the other way round, would: ‘All that remains today is a handful of buildings and mining relics’ be correct?
Yes! You have only one handful, so singular.
Highly debatable given that “all” can mean “everything”. I would argue that it is in that sense that “all” is used ín this instance.
What a fascinating subject this is! It has nagged at me for years. I’m delighted that you’ve addressed it, but I’m not sure I agree with the way you have analysed your initial example. I’m pretty confident that your sentence should read “all that remains …”
The problem lies in that teasing word “all”, which can work in so many different ways, grammatically speaking. If you use a plural verb in your example, you’re assuming that “all” is used here in a kind of adjectival way, applying to an implied plural noun – “the buildings and mining relics are all [the somethings ] that remain …” But all what things?
If you parse it out, you’ll find that using a plural verb dictates that the rest of the sentence should present a matching plural: “the buildings and mining relics are all the somethings that remain out of a collection of those somethings”. But that’s not what the sentence is saying at all.
In fact, as I see it the word “all” is used here as a proxy for “the sum total”, which is a very common use of “all”. We can rewrite the sentence thus: “A handful of buildings and mining relics are the sum total of what remains today of the once-thriving mining town of Russell Gulch, Colorado.”
You can of course object that if we change the sentence around, we end up with “The sum total of what remains today are …” which is clearly ridiculous; but the fact is that that’s a different sentence! One way or another, we’re dovetailing a plural into a singular, and I would argue that you have to adapt the case of the verb to fit whatever construction you use to pull off that trick!
By the way, in some ways the use of “a handful” in the example sentence muddies the water. You could argue that this collective noun is the real subject of the sentence, and is singular, so the verb following “all” should be singular for that reason. I can see the logic, but I don’t think it’s really what this question is about.
I don’t mean to be needlessly argumentative, by the way; I just think this is a big subject, and it’s worth digging into more deeply. It’s great that you provide a forum for this kind of discussion.