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The question about 'species of moth' intrigued me because the subject of 'many this of that' reveals something about how we conceptualise unknown quantities. A countable thing (like the number of moths in the whole world) can be regarded as an uncountable entity (since I cannot possibly know the number) and therefore can be regarded, conceptually, as 'mothness'.

In which case I might express 'species of moth' rather than 'moths'.

So I looked at a number of Ngrams and was surprised at the result.

But the order reverses for dogs :

I am interested in how we manage global concepts, whether fluid (wine) or disparate (food) or quantised (cars/dogs).

Can anyone suggest why there should be this reversal regarding dogs ?

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    I'm not sure I'd like to have to come up with an accurate figure for the number of dogs or cars in the world either.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jan 30, 2018 at 14:00
  • Interesting observation. The case of wine and food is different, because those are often used uncountably. But car vs. dog is hard to account for.
    – Colin Fine
    Commented Jan 30, 2018 at 14:01
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    @Colin: I can't see any real consistency here. According to Google Books, plural two kinds of cars is almost twice as common as singular two kinds of car (the opposite preference to that implied by OP's many makes example). On the other hand, I'm not surprised to see that singular two kinds of wine is seven times as common as plural two kinds of wines, which reflects OP's examples for that particular noun.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Jan 30, 2018 at 14:14
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    I can't answer, as I'm in the 25% who would say "many breeds of dog."
    – Phil M Jones
    Commented Jan 30, 2018 at 14:22
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    These Ngrams seem to show that it's pretty idiosyncratic. Using 'breeds/kinds of horse/s' reveals that in these cases, the plural form is favoured.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jan 30, 2018 at 17:26

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