- 1不可數（名詞）；文法課本寫「不可數名詞」，字典標 [U]。日常義則是「數不清的」。提醒：英文的可數／不可數是英文自己的規定，不等於中文有沒有量詞——中文 advice 要說「一個建議」，英文卻不能說 an advice。
This word has two lives. In grammar — the life this entry is about — an uncountable noun is one English treats as a mass, not as separate items you can number. You cannot say 'two moneys' or 'three happinesses', and you cannot put 'a' in front: not 'an information', just 'information'. These nouns take a singular verb ('the news is good'), use 'much' and 'little' instead of 'many' and 'few', and if you need to count them you count the container or the portion instead: two pieces of advice, a glass of water, three bowls of rice. Dictionaries mark them [U], and countable ones [C]. The important thing, and the thing that trips everyone up, is that this is a decision each language makes for itself, not a fact about the world. Rice is uncountable in English even though you can literally count the grains. And many nouns have both lives: 'coffee' is uncountable as a substance but countable when you order ('two coffees, please'); 'experience' is uncountable when it means knowledge you have built up, countable when it means single events. Outside grammar books, 'uncountable' has an ordinary meaning too: too many to count. 'Uncountable stars.' That use is rather literary; in normal speech people say 'countless' or just 'so many'.
組成un- ('not') + countable, which is count + -able ('able to be'). So: not able to be counted. 'Count' came into English from Old French conter, from Latin computare — the same Latin word that eventually gave us 'compute' and 'computer'. A computer is, at heart, a counting machine.
原始詞典資料4 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
uncountableadj/ʌnˈkaʊntəbl̩/
- 1
So many as to be incapable of being counted.
- The reasons for our failure were as uncountable as the grains of sand on a beach.
- Mr. Chambre has since spent uncountable hours and even more uncountable dollars buying upward of 23,000 documents, and he figures to be just hitting speed.
- 2
mathematicssciencesIncapable of being put into one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers or any subset thereof.
- Cantor’s “diagonal proof” shows that the set of real numbers is uncountable.
- 3
grammarhuman-scienceslinguisticsThat cannot be used freely with numbers or the indefinite article, and therefore usually takes no plural form. Example: information.
- Many languages do not distinguish countable nouns from uncountable nouns.
- One meaning in law of the usually uncountable noun "information" is used in the plural and is countable.
uncountablenoun/ʌnˈkaʊntəbl̩/
- 1
grammarhuman-scienceslinguisticsA noun that is uncountable.
- But inherent uncountables such as 'stuffs' can be conceptualized in two different ways, depending on whether they are viewed in terms of quantity or in terms of quality.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。