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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>?

RegDwigнt
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apaderno
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3 Answers3

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<singular-noun> <plural-noun>

is the way to go.

RegDwigнt
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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 Apr 03 '15 at 16:03
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    Jobs report, drugs dealer, weapons manufacturer, numbers crunching, Cubs fan, birds conservation etc – Alan Carmack Dec 07 '16 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 Dec 08 '16 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 Sep 19 '17 at 08:27
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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 (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 Oct 10 '17 at 09:11
  • @RegDwight ~~And if wanting to explicitly indicate that the newspaper has more than one article (unnecessary in most cases, since a newspaper typically has always multiple articles), you could refer to its "articles' authors". – 11qq00 Oct 07 '21 at 18:44
  • @Eric Burel ~~In that case, with one-to-one correspondence datapage to ID, the intended parsing would be "[datapageID]s", and probably can be constructed in some (if not most, with long enough verbiage) languages unambiguously as such. some prioritzation scheme with brackets, underscores, and capitilzation, as seen in "[dataPage_id]s", could suit. – 11qq00 Oct 07 '21 at 18:46
  • @EricBurel In English, the most natural way would be to move the plural marker to the very end of the noun phrase. So, although it's an ID for "data pages" in the plural, the natural way to attach an ID to that would be to attach it on as "data page ID" and "data page IDs" for the plural of that new phrase. In a programming language I'd probably write it as DataPageID or DataPageId; presonally I prefer "ID" because "Id" looks kind of silly to my eyes, but by preference, follow the local conventions of whatever environment you are programming in regarding capitalization style. – Brandin Aug 31 '23 at 06:01
  • The usual scenario is that the premodifying (attributive) noun is in singular form, but this is not always the case. Travellers checks, systems analysts, women doctors and dogs homes (contrast donkey sanctuaries) are exceptions. And sometimes both forms are used by different sets of people (nine day wonder / nine days wonder): one has to check usage. – Edwin Ashworth Aug 31 '23 at 10:35
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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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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.

apaderno
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Daniel
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