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Is it correct to say user accounts or users account when referring to the accounts any user has on a site like this one?

In general, in the case of a noun that is used as adjective for the noun that follows, is it better to use <plural-noun> <singular-noun> or <singular-noun> <plural-noun>?

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<singular-noun> <plural-noun>

is the way to go.

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    What if there is more than two nouns involved? For example, if I have multiple newspapers, where each one has multiple articles, each article having itself multiple authors, should I say "Newspaper article authors"? Or "Newspaper articles authors"?
    – Maël Nison
    Commented Apr 3, 2015 at 16:03
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    Jobs report, drugs dealer, weapons manufacturer, numbers crunching, Cubs fan, birds conservation etc
    – Alan Carmack
    Commented Dec 7, 2016 at 14:30
  • @AlanCarmack red herring is red and also a herring. And the worst part is, you full well know it. Don't troll noobs. They will keep making mistakes because of you. And just by the way: some of your examples are exceptionally ungrammatical in my neck of the woods.
    – RegDwigнt
    Commented Dec 8, 2016 at 10:53
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    @MaëlNison "Newspaper article authors" refers to any authors of any articles that are found in any newspaper. "This newspaper's article authors" refers to any authors of any articles in this newspaper. "This newspaper article's authors" refers to any authors of this newspaper article. Using the possessive is an indication of whether you're talking about the general (e.g. any newspaper article) or the specific (e.g. this particular newspaper article).
    – Flater
    Commented Sep 19, 2017 at 8:27
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    Sorry to bother, but I have a lot of trouble this those plural rules. Let's say that I have 10 datapages, each datapage have 1 id. An array of those "datapages ids", whould be named "DataPagesIds", "DataPageIds", "DataPage's Ids"... ? I am voluntarily reffering to technical stuff, because if I write <singular-noun> <plural-noun> (DataPageIds), we may think that 1 data page have 10 ids, where I mean the reverse... And if I write (DataPagesId), this is not good either, I could have 1 unique id for those 10 datapages. So datapage ids seems correct to me, yet more confusing than datapages ids.
    – Eric Burel
    Commented Oct 10, 2017 at 9:11
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Use user account for one account and user accounts for many accounts.

This is a compound noun with account modified by user. In such cases, we use the singular form of the first noun. Other examples are car keys and house windows.

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  • oeh... this is singular, there's missing an s.
    – Em1
    Commented Jun 25, 2012 at 8:21
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You seem to have answered you own question.

"... when referring to the accounts any user has on a ..."

One user. Multiple accounts. "User accounts". "Users Account," while not meaning anything at all, sounds like multiple users are using one account—or like "Brothers Grimm..." but that doesn't work in the same way.

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  • User's Account, refers to the "the users" account, which is singular.
    – Anonymous Type
    Commented Feb 20, 2011 at 22:16

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