‘Data is’ or ‘data are’? The FT has a comment
Howard Lake | 14 February 2023 | Blogs
“The data is useful” or “the data are useful”. Which would you use? The Financial Times has just updated its stylebook and changed its mind.
Is data singular or plural? For a word that fundraisers and marketers use so frequently, and which lies at the heart of our use of CRMs and our ability to fundraise efficiently, there is quite some disagreement, or at least a laissez faire attitude.
The answer is that data is plural. One datum, many data. I included data in my list of 10 Latin words that fundraisers use every day in 2014. Given its derivation you could think it is the perfect word for fundraisers:
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“It comes, so appropriately for fundraisers, from ‘do’ meaning “to give, offer”. It is the plural of ‘datum’, meaning ‘something given’.”
So, we should all say “data are useful”.
But that is a minority approach, based on my experience with fundraisers and charity tech people over some years. I use the singular too. And of course some of us slip between “is” and “are” depending on the situation or the audience.
Does it really matter?
Does it matter? There’s an argument that precision in communication (and business communication in particular) does matter. Indeed it would be ironic that when describing data (which is mostly in a binary state these days) we can be so lax with how we refer to it.
Is a collection of numerical or textual information a singular whole or the combination of its multiple parts?
Is you is? Or is you ain’t?
Now the FT has changed its mind and updated its style guide accordingly. (The former FT Lexicon, its style guide, ceased being shared online in May 2019, so I can’t link to it).
It is not alone. The Guardian concurs:
The Economist takes the same approach too, although with the qualification that the writer should use whichever word sounds the more natural. So does BBC News.
For links to other newspaper style guides, try Rareformnewmedia.com.
UK Fundraising doesn’t have a style guide but we are keen on effective communication. You could say we are singular about the plurality of words available to us.
Now that has been resolved, how should one pronounce ‘data’…
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.