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Duplicate of:
“User accounts” or “users account”
“Employee list” or “employees list”
Should a list of tokens be called a “token list” or a “tokens list”
“BookList” or “booksList?”
Is it correct to say “lesson count” or “lessons count”?
"Thing count" or "things count"
And others

Which of the following are correct?

  1. Countries List
  2. Country List

It is the title of a web page where users can view the list of countries and select one.

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  • This may be different based on one's dialect, but for me (American speaker) only Country List and List of Countries are correct.
    – user21497
    Jan 17, 2013 at 7:07
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    @BillFranke- Interestingly, if you add an adjective then countries becomes viable: banned countries list, first-world countries list, etc. So then can you elide the adjective and get countries list?
    – Jim
    Jan 17, 2013 at 7:12
  • @Jim good point, but then it sounds exactly like the possessive form, i.e. countries' list.
    – Magnus
    Jan 17, 2013 at 7:19
  • @tchrist - User's Guide / Users' Guide, in here Guide can be taken as a sigular ! so i am not sure how countries list could be similar to them Bill thanks bro, it is an interesting share Jim thanks mate, my notion here to use "Countries List" was to have a short title
    – Abhilash
    Jan 17, 2013 at 7:21
  • @Jim: Yes, Banned Countries List etc. is perfectly normal to me. One can do that elision thing with math, and with natural language in a piece of discourse, but not as a rule of thumb: No one will know where it came from, because elision isn't always detectable. I think that Countries List may be normal British English, though.
    – user21497
    Jan 17, 2013 at 7:27

2 Answers 2

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Surely it's obvious that the list is a list. If this is a title and it needs to be as short as possible, then just head the page

Countries

as that is a perfectly adequate description of the content. To add List is at best superfluous and at worst treating your users like idiots.

As such, this is not the same question as one about whether to use an apostrophe as in Users/User's/Users' Guide because for a book title you do need the word Guide. Even if "Countries" is a link with no visible content, it's unlikely to need List: it's likely to be more useful if it were worded "Choose a country".

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My gut feeling (British) says that a list always takes a singular form to qualify what kind of list it is, unless you use list of .... My gut also insists that list of countries sounds more natural.

If you used a plural form then it'd also end up being somewhat easily confused with the possessive form - i.e. the countries' list or the country's list.

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  • Yeah same here, i also feel that List of countries sound more natural but is usage of "Country List" correct ? Note: I have to keep the title as short as possible
    – Abhilash
    Jan 17, 2013 at 7:24
  • I'd say it's grammatically correct, and if your goal is an extremely short title then go for it. At the very least it should cause less confusion when people read it out loud ;).
    – Magnus
    Jan 17, 2013 at 7:25

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