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That one's a bit mean given that data does have a distinct plural, it just happens to be spelled the same because whoever came up with english didn't really grok the phonetic alphabet.

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Datum is the singular, which is one point of data. When you group together a datum with another datum, they become data.

And the origin of that plural form comes from Latin.

Data can be used as a plural or as a mass noun. When it is a mass noun it is treated as singular. Hence we say "data is hard to come by" versus "data are hard to come by."

Also datums is the plural of datum when it is used in an engineering sense, which is the most likely place one would still encounter it.

>That one's a bit mean given that data does have a distinct plural, it just happens to be spelled the same because whoever came up with english didn't really grok the phonetic alphabet.

Isn't 'data' already plural, with 'datum' being the singular of the plural 'data'?

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