Why does American English pluralize certain singular nouns?

Question

I keep hearing "A savings of $10" or that something is "a ways off".

Sounds deeply weird to my British English ear.

Answer 1

I generally consider "saving" to be the act and "savings" the resulting product of that act. This pundit/economist makes a similar point.

So I might say "I made a savings of $10." or "I am saving $10 by switching vendors."

I don't consider savings plural, but a collective noun. This is similar to

"One billion dollars is a lot of money."

Answer 2

Savings certainly seems to originate from saving. Both British and American English have a tendency to let uncountable nouns take plurals if there is a manner and contextual reason to discretize them. ("look at all the water!" for a natural body vs. "look at all the waters!" for, perhaps, an impressive number of glasses of water) As others have pointed out, it is reasonable to conceptually divide your overall saving into many saving-s, especially if they are arriving in the form of many meager paychecks. This explanation isn't entirely satisfying, though, as the word is actually interpreted as singular in current use.

Etymonline attests savings to 1737, and the compound savings bank to 1817. Usage in compounds may affect the distribution across AE/BE. American English generally requires the attributive element in a compound noun to be singular, whereas BE has occurrences of both plural and singular. From Wikipedia:

The plural may be used to emphasise the plurality of the attribute, especially in British English but very rarely in American English: a careers advisor, a languages expert.

As such, Americans may have been reinterpreting savings in savings bank/account/deposit/etc as an independent singular word, while Brits saw it as a plural form linked to the verb save. (Here I have two identical words in my lexicon: one for the derived plural savings = repeated actions of saving, and one for the independent unit savings = a sum of reserved money) The matter is further muddled by AE/BE differences on collectives. American English is unable to use bare collective nouns as plurals, and so constructions of the savings is... and similar tended to reinforce the singularity of the term. Another factor is blocking by alternate terms - namely, Wikipedia claims that the term savings and loan is uncommon in the UK, as building societies were a more common, related institution.

This whole conjecture (in its wild and unverified glory) reminds me of Steven Pinker's word structure theory, as described in "Words and Rules: the Ingredients of Language". He offers situations like bigfoot and walkman, where the term is notably distinct from its head word (foot and man), and so must be considered a single, new unit when constructing plurals. Hence most people will say bigfoots and walkmans rather than bigfeet and walkmen.

Ways in expressions like a ways off was likely not a plural form; from OED:

In a good, great, little, long ways, and a ways, the origin of the use of ways for way is obscure. It might possibly have arisen from the analogy of phrases containing the adverbial genitive.

As for why the expressions are more common in AE, your guess is as good as mine. The rise and fall of usage is subject to so many intervening historical factors, it's amazing to me that anyone can get any research done at all in etymology.

Answer 3

NOAD gives this usage note:

Use savings in the modifying position (savings bank, savings bond) and when referring to money saved in a bank: your savings are fully insured. When speaking of an act of saving, as when one obtains a discount on a purchase, the preferred form is saving: with this coupon you will receive a saving of $3 (not a savings of $3).

So much for the prescriptive point of view. When you hear "a savings" it is normally from ad-speak, which is a notoriously unreliable source of grammaticality in English. Nevertheless it is pervasive (which in pop culture works with the same effect as persuasive). People hear a thing often and adopt it in their own speech. Today, I doubt many people are even sure which is appropriate, and just go with whatever sounds right to their ear.

Answer 4

It is just one of those dialect things. Interesting exactly the reverse is also true. In the UK kids learn maths in school, whereas in the US kids learn math. There is even less excuse for that than "a ways off", since math(s) is only half of the word mathematics.

Answer 5

I think I can explain what's going on. First, I'll explain with "savings" and "woods". In some dialects of American English, "savings" and "woods" are uncountable nouns ("savings" with considerably more frequency than "woods"). You generally don't say "a savings" or "a woods", but "some savings" and "some woods".

However, suppose you wanted to translate "a small wood" from British to American. You can't say "a small wood", because the noun is "woods". You can't say "some small woods", because that would mean there was actually more than one wood.¹ To be strictly grammatical, you probably should say "a small expanse of woods" or "a small stretch of woods",² but lots of people just say "a small woods".

It's the same thing with savings. Generally, you'd say

I have some savings in the bank.

But when you need to put a quantity to it, "some" stops sounding right, and you get

I have a savings of $100 in the bank.

Compare this to another uncountable noun, "water". You can say "Walking through the woods, we came to some water," but you can't say "we came to some small water," or "some water of 30 hectares."

For "ways", you hear both "some ways off" and "a ways off". This Google Ngram suggests that originally, the expressions people used were "some ways off" and "a good ways off", just like "some woods" and "a small woods". However, now "a ways off" has taken over.

¹ Actually, Google search yields quite a few instances where "some small woods" means "a small wood". To me, "a small woods" sounds much better than "some small woods" for the singular, even though without the adjective, "some woods" sounds better than "a woods", but that might just be my dialect.

² Google Ngrams shows that the most common collective noun used with "woods" is clearly "stretch", although "area" and "expanse" are not uncommon. A problem with my example above is that expanses are not small. The phrase "large expanse of woods" collects 40 times as many hits as "small expanse of woods".

Answer 6

You are all making this much too complicated. Americans simply like to put "s" on things that don't need it. In football there is an off side and an on side. The penalty is for being off side. However, half of Americans say off sides. There is no one who says there is a penalty for pass interferences or roughing the passers. Only off side gets this extra "s". The same is true for savings. The plural version is a legitimate word for multiple savings. However saying "a savings" is the same as saying "a books" which would never be accepted. Once the error becomes common usage it is natural to try to justify it, particularly if you didn't know it was wrong. However, that doesn't mean it's not wrong.

Answer 7

Basically, you're "mis-spelling" the word "ways"; not really, of course -- it's perfectly acceptable to spell "ways" without an apostrophe -- but many people (myself included) sometimes do, and you're misapprehending what the "s" signifies, as a result. Think of the word as if it were "A way's off", as in a possessive. It's still idiomatic, but think of it in the context of this sentence:

"That's a good day's work."

According to Google, most people don't include the apostrophe. This is almost exactly the same construction, and is doing almost exactly the same thing, grammatically (almost -- one's a noun, the other's an adjective, but nouns and adjectives are sister forms anyway, so...). If we were to include a few dropped words, it would look this way:

"That's a good day's [worth of] work."

Both those sentences can still be heard quite commonly, in the US. So now, look at this sentence:

"That's a good way's [worth of] distance."

Or, as the other respondent above noted:

"That's a little way's [travel-time] off."

Because not many people who speak this way spend much time writing, few ever reflect on why it is they speak the way they do; but these sorts of omitted words and phrases can commonly be resurrected or eliminated, as the need arises. "That's a good way's a-way" can turn into "That's a good bit away," (as in: that's a good bit (of travel) away" or "a good stretch away". So the "-s", here is a remnant of a genitive, and has nothing to do with plural or singular. The OED hints at this, but in truth the derivation is pretty clear-cut; the "-s" sound in ancient Middle English often indicated a genitive case (as is the case with "whence").

The genitive is also called "the possessive case", so what I'm saying here is totally consistent with the idea that this is a holdover from an ancient genitive. All i'm trying to do is give you a more direct way of apprehending what it means when we say "ways" isn't plural, but is instead a holdover from the genitive.

"Savings" is much more easily understood; one can save a lot more than money, so "all the things/items/possessions I have saved" would be equal to "All my savings." Similarly, the grammar is analogous to this phrase, which one might hear in a barbershop:

"Jimmy, come sweep up the cuttings."

"Cuttings" would also often be used in clothing factories, plant nurseries, tailor shops, and the like. In a kitchen, after people have finished dining, one might hear:

"Set the leavings aside for the dog."

"The leavings" is simply a short way of saying "what everyone has left," or "whatever is left over". Or, in a wood-working shop:

"Sweep up the shavings, and toss them out."

So: savings, cuttings, leavings, and shavings: you will find all of these are standard terms listed in the dictionary. None are considered regional, none are considered slang, and none are marked as peculiar dialect. These are all standard English words.

Within the context of these examples, "savings" makes perfect sense: after one has paid off one's expenses, and settled one's debts (by whatever means possible), whatever one manages to hold on to is one's savings.

Answer 8

I think it's merely an attempt to communicate a greater magnitude, i.e., that "a savings" is greater than "a saving".

I would generally associate this with the American South / West...though I don't think this would sound out of place in the North in Britain (correct me if I 'm wrong - I'm American). Are you perhaps from the south of England?