For example, if you are referring to books belonging to your two teachers, you would write, “my teachers’ books
, the length in number of characters is fluctuating
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There is no rule about whether the attributive noun is singular or plural
GRAMMAR Attributive Nouns What are attributive nouns? Attributive nouns - also called noun adjuncts, attributive nouns, or qualifying nouns - are nouns that function
When a noun like baseball or vacation works like an adjective, as in baseball player and vacation day, it becomes part of a class known as attributive
Beyond that you might initially use a descriptive phrase such as the fuel stored in wing tanks, further described as wing tanks fuel, (possibly, abbreviated to "wtf" or similar)
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Examples: Singular form shoe shop record library hymn book car factory word count Plural form games room sports ground drinks cabinet careers adviser
Instead, I would say these are attributive nouns, which we can demonstrate with morphological tests (salaries but not *salarier or *salariest or *more salary), syntactically with modification tests (high salaries tax but not *very salaries tax or *extremely salaries tax), and syntactically with distribution tests (*the tax was
The third choice in each group uses a plural noun that is not in the possessive case
Often, etic plurality is
An arms dealer doesn't usually sell a single arm, they sell many arms, so it's plural
Both noun phrases can be used to refer to a plural number of heads
As we said earlier, the term “kid” is a singular noun for one child
This is often achieved by using a noun as an adjective before the noun it modifies
And just because a plural can be used as an attributive, that doesn’t mean that it—or the singular version of the same word—can’t be used as a possessive
Just because a word can be used as an attributive noun doesn’t mean that it should always or should only be used that way
In Google Books (which should be a more reliable source but to my consternation it
Jun 8, 2020 at 19:37 Question on attributive nouns/noun adjuncts
have noted the apparently increasing variety of formations with a plural attributive noun" (Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study, 2010)
; The meal was twenty pounds