Amount of people

Good one Porsche! Agree to the end.

You did not make this one up, Dima. I was taught it as a rule of grammar...however I am now 67 years old and I don't think anyone is taught grammar rules anymore.

"Amount" is misused often. I am not conscious of hearing or reading "number" being used inappropriately.

Dima, if you ever invite me to a party, I think I'll pass on the Bloody Marys.

It's not a problem of being unable to distinguish between countable and uncountable. I find it hard to believe that people don't know the difference between countable and uncountable nouns. Otherwise they would say things like

the number of water in the ocean
the number of sand on the beach

And they don't. Instead, as porsche says, "amount" and "much" are shifting to take some of the load of "number" and "many". There is no trend in the opposite direction.

This seems to be more of a categorization problem than a grammar problem. There are two types of quantities, discreet and continuous. Speaking of an amount of a discreet quantity is like talking about the size of blue.

I think that I'd object to Goofy's characterization of water and sand as countable nouns.

The particles making up these objects are countable, but the aggregates are uncounted. One might refer to a number of molecules or moles (the molecule being implicit in the unit "mole") of water, but an amount of water. Likewise, one might have a number of grains of sand but an amount of sand. In this sense, the grains of sand and the water molecules lose their individual identities (or they are ignored by the speaker) when considered in the aggregate.

This line of reasoning leads one to conclude that a mob comprises an amount of people rather than a number of persons.

I didn't say that "water" and "sand" are countable nouns. They are uncountable nouns, also called mass nouns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncountable_noun

I am a Pole and, surprisingly enough, people make the equivalent of this mistake in Polish. Somehow people don't stop to pay attention to it. But indeed this is a mistake.

It's not a mistake. It might not be accepted in formal writing, but that's a matter of register.

From the The Columbia Guide to Standard American English
http://www.bartleby.com/68/52/352.html
"Use amount with singular mass nouns (an amount of money; the amount of love), and use number with plural count nouns (the number of castles; a number of sophomores). Common and Vulgar English frequently use amount with plural count nouns (a huge amount of children on the playground), and repeated exposures to that usage often blur the Standard models for us. There are also instances where plural count nouns are treated as representing those items in mass and hence usable with amount (He contracted for an enormous amount of apples). In speech such a use might go almost unnoticed, but Edited English would most likely change it to number or find an entirely different way to say it."

Note that "Vulgar English" and "Common English" are pejoratives here; they are just nonstandard.

um... That should be "are not pejoratives here"

If you can reasonably count the individuals of the group it is 'number', but if you cannot it is 'amount'. This is the rule I taught my children.

I think the the comment made above regarding countable and measurable as a basic method of distinction between the two is a good model to follow.

I do dislike hearing a group of people refered to as an 'amount of people'. Not nice! I think I need one big Bloody Mary and that would be a large amount of Bloody Mary. Then again I could recover more slowly by consuming several individual Bloody Mary's but that number of Bloody Mary's would render me even more senseless than I already am. :-)

One of my readers has asked me about an extension of this problem. Is it correct to say, "A number of accidents have occurred at this corner" or "A number of accidents has occured at this corner"?

I understand the reasoning behind the question, since "number" is a singular noun even though it describes plural items. However, I believe the correct usage is:

A number of accidents HAVE occurred.....
but
The number of accidents that have occurred has risen.

I hope this adds to the conversation!

Helen Wilkie
http://www.masteringbusinesswriting.com

It's very, very easy- Number is always used when talking about a plural. Whether you know how many people are in a crowd makes no difference- 'Amount of people in a crowd' just sounds clumsy.

Totally agree. In fact before I saw your post, I posted on Facebook :-
'I'm getting grumpier. "The amount of people".... what? 3,000 Kgs of people?'

I agree that to talk about a number of people or cars makes much more sense and sounds better than to talk about an amount of people. But this seems to me to have more to do with the meaning of words than with "grammar rules".

The number of times I have seen this abomination (e.g. "the amount of shoes", "the amount of times", "the amount of goals", "the amount of chances" et cetera ad nauseam) is truly remarkable. The simplest way to know which to use is this: If you would inquire "How many?" then use "number". If you would inquire "How much?" then use "amount"?

How many people were at the party last night? Bingo --> Number of people

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on historic principals also defines 'amount'
as:To come up to a number or quantity,the sum total to which anything mounts up
and 'number; as,the sum or aggregate of any collection of individual things or persons.

@Hairy If one looks up "less" on wiktionary.org, one can see that "less" has been used to mean "fewer" from its earliest appearance in OE.
"Amount" is a quite different kettle of fish, I agree, and goes with uncountable nouns.
Bonus points for "depredation" of the language though, quite a picture. "Proper" usage has however changed since Dickens

Oops.
Forgive the superfluous "I" in my previous entry.
Finger trouble.

@HS "I'd submit that there is a place for both words" if I may quote your good self from the less/fewer thread.

@jtu
I do not dispute that there is a place for both words.
I'd just prefer to see and hear them used properly.

This bothers me too, along with the use of "less" when "fewer" is correct. But this writer's credibility is damaged by ending the very first sentence with a dangling preposition. Sigh.

I remember teaching the rule in 8th grade English: amount for nouns that cannot be counted and number for objects that can be counted. An amount of sugar in a cake but a number of cups of sugar in the cake.

I'm very confused. I learned your way of thinking in grade school. I remember our teacher said that people are counted, not poured into a flask so it is the "number" of people.
However my niece is a teacher & when I corrected someone that they should say "numbers" when referring to people, she cleared her throat as if I was wrong but she didn't want to correct me. The worst people for making grammatical errors are news anchors on TV. Wouldn't you think journalists would have learned proper English, Literature & Grammar?? Or --- is it me who is wrong about "numbers" and "amounts"..???

When someone tells you about the amount of people try asking them..."how much people"
The result is usually an immediate response of, "do you mean how many" to which you can reply "no, i mean how much" and every time I've tried this the other person has said "well, that's bad grammar."
You can then point out that the grammatical error is their's and continue to talk about the use of ;
for free when you mean free
males and females when you mean men and women or boys and girls
warm or cold temperatures
myself when you mean me
going forward when you mean in future
and the popularity at the moment of doubling up by saying
reverse back/repeated again/ and countless other examples which you can never recall when you need to list them. The problem is that once you're aware of these annoying things you hear them constantly. Life can be tough if you care about the language.