English Language & Usage Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
English isn't my mother tongue, and when we recently talked to a native speaker (during some company audit), he pointed out that the plural word "trainings" is actually wrong (he pointed that it is a very common mistake and was almost amused by it).
I couldn't understand why and wondered what the correct plural of "training" would be. Online Dictionaries/Thesaurus don't answer it, so it's probably another opinion-based statement. I haven't found a source to back it up, though.
Training is both countable and uncountable. Usually, referring to a process, it is uncountable and has no plural.
It is sometimes used to mean "a specific training event", and is then countable, and has the plural "trainings". The OED has examples of this use going back to 1578, with the plural recorded from 1598.
Training is normally used as an uncountable noun by native English speakers, and in this form it doesn't take a plural. However, some dictionaries list it as being both countable and uncountable, with the caveat that the countable form is little used. Google Ngrams shows the relative frequencies for both forms:
Interestingly, Google Ngrams indicates that usage of trainings is on the increase. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing how much this is influenced by native English speakers adopting the countable form.
The Cambridge Dictionary and Collins Dictionary indicate that it is uncountable. The Oxford Living Dictionaries indicates that it is a mass noun. Wiktionary mentions the plural form, but says that it is not often used. Other online dictionaries offer no opinion. No online dictionary that I can find provides an example of usage as a countable noun.
I don't think that I have heard a fellow native English speaker use the countable form. If I have, it would be only rarely. My own feeling is that you should avoid using the countable form if you ever have ambitions of being mistaken for a native English speaker.
Cambridge Dictionary: Training
Using the plural of gerunds (that is a present participle used as a noun, and then pluralized) is only recently more common.
Gerunds are non-count nouns, but describe a process not the thing that is processing. There is a perceptible lexical gap of a noun for those things and to fill it there is semantic shift of X-ing to an individual object X-ed)
I was learning today (present participle)
Learning took place today (gerund)
What were your learnings today? (countable object)
As to usage, a newspaper editor or school teacher will mark this as terribly wrong because it sounds very grating on first hearing, like a foreignism. However it is becoming more common in business-speak. I would recommend not using it, but now you know how to recognize it when used:
'X-ings' = 'things X-ed'
Which is all to say that 'trainings' is the correct plural, but you probably want to avoid it and use 'training sessions' or 'skills we were trained for' depending on purpose.
Although some treat training as an uncountable noun (that is, never used in the plural), the plural form trainings is in widespread use.
If you want to follow prescriptivism, you can use training sessions.
I agree with Mick that training is an uncountable noun. In the example given by Mr. Fine of a specific training event allowing training to become countable, I disagree. In the case of becoming countable, the portion being counted is the event. Therefor, it would be "there are multiple training events available at the pavilion" (or whatever). I see many cases where much effort is made to "fix" the plural when a simple rewording will eliminate the contentious context and allow an, arguably, better flow by using the standard form.
