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Which one of these two statements is correct?

Our staff do ...

Our staff does ...

And is staffs ever correct?

Sven Yargs
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Mysterion
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4 Answers4

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In British English, one can say "our staff do", because they use plural verbal agreement to emphasize when an entity is made up of a group of people, whether this entity itself is marked as plural or not. This is also true of companies, bands, sports teams and other things which are commonly used in plural forms as well as singular forms. The verbs are usually plural for one band or many bands ("Many bands play at the festival" as well as "Radiohead are a band").

In American English, one says "our staff does", because in our grammar, we are not concerning ourselves with whether an entity is made up of many people or not. Since staff is singular, we treat it grammatically as singular. It is no different for us than a stick-staff in terms of grammar.

As RegDwight pointed out, this was discussed previously with regards to company names.

Community
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Kosmonaut
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    I will throw in a link to the question about company names. – RegDwigнt Sep 21 '10 at 12:51
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    It depends on what they're doing. If they're all working together as a single entity doing the same thing, it's singular and if they're doing different things it's plural, I believe. – Ullallulloo Sep 21 '10 at 20:49
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    With all due respect, although they are not in the majority, there is no shortage of American uses of staff in the plural. This ngram puts the ratio at only 1.6:1 in favor of the singular. Contrast that with the British preference which favors the plural by 3:1. The Brits favor the sing. more strongly than we do the plural. – tchrist Nov 21 '12 at 17:35
  • I have been an American English speaker for 43 years and have never heard "Van Halen ARE a whatever" until about two years ago on Wikipedia. I maintain that a band is a single entity and therefore it "IS" not "ARE" whatever it IS. – Jasmine Oct 16 '14 at 22:06
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    @Jasmine With the greatest of respect, usage doesn't consist of what you personally have heard - it consists of what people do. Here's a magazine article from 1978 Van Halen are from Calafornia if you do a search you'll find that quote as the opening sentence in the tenth para. – Araucaria - Him Oct 19 '14 at 14:39
  • And I'm saying that is what American speakers do. – Jasmine Oct 20 '14 at 16:10
  • So do we believe the well-researched results Google presents, or one person's opinion (doubtless based on experience, but with a far smaller sample size to draw upon)? – Edwin Ashworth Jan 09 '20 at 18:52
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    The problem with n-gram data is that it's very easy to distort the picture by overgeneralizing. In the charts @tchrist linked, things like "the tasks undertaken by our staff are..." would be included. More importantly, it's also case-sensitive for lowercase, even though sentences starting with "Our staff is/are" would be the least likely to be coincidentally adjacent. Just making the search case-insensitive already gives you a 2:1 "is" ratio for AmE and 2.6:1 "are" ratio for BrE. If we look case-sensitive for only "Our staff is/are" we get a whopping 6:1 "is" preference for AmE. – Kosmonaut Jan 24 '20 at 17:43
  • Certainly, the Google 5-grams 'ensure that our staff is/are' (which strings filter out many false positives) provide a persuasive argument for a US / UK divide here. – Edwin Ashworth Aug 10 '21 at 16:15
  • @Jasmine Would the agreement-with-wordform-only approach go as far as 'The jury was arguing among itself'? – Edwin Ashworth Aug 10 '21 at 16:20
  • @EdwinAshworth that's actually nonsense... a jury can not argue among itself - JURORS would do that. My comment was more about a change in the way people are using collective nouns such as "the band" or "the group" and in the past we considered these a single thing, but Americans are increasingly saying "the band are on tour" which sounds real odd to me. N-gram data be damned, I know Americans and we never used to say that. – Jasmine Aug 11 '21 at 20:22
  • @Jasmine 'The jury were arguing among themselves' is arguably less nonsensical than say 'It was raining cats and dogs'; both are fine in the UK. Acceptable English isn't uniform, is rarely say UK-specific, and changes. – Edwin Ashworth Aug 12 '21 at 13:59
  • I'm gonna go ahead and disagree, as a jury is a single thing. The members of a jury are a group, but the jury itself is a single thing. It sounds better to me that way, and I've been an American my whole life, and all I'm doing here is agreeing with the answer. It doesn't need any more discussion, it's been over 10 years since this was posted. – Jasmine Sep 07 '21 at 20:37
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I disagree with Kosmonaut. In BrE, staff is used as both a singular and a plural for purposes of agreement, although plural is certainly more popular.

Here are some examples with singular (from the Oxford English Corpus):

  • Since the newspaper staff is inundated with these letters everyday, they have no choice but to publish at least some of them.

  • An intelligence staff is organic to the brigade and its subordinate battalions and squadron.

V2Blast
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J D OConal
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    And Kosmonaut did not exclude singular use in BrE. In general collectives like these are always singular in (careful) AmE and may be singular or plural in BrE depending on whether their unity or their collectivity is more salient in a particular utterance. – Colin Fine Sep 23 '10 at 17:02
  • Would have to check corpi(? ;-)), but JD's examples look like "singular when it's about staff as a(n organizational) unit" and "plural when it's about the people in this unit". – Jürgen A. Erhard May 01 '11 at 16:34
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With regard to the question "And is staffs ever correct?" I note that a Google Books search for the phrase "merged their staffs" returns nine relevant unique matches, ranging from in year of publication from 1951 to 2014. Here are three typical examples. From Virginia Department of Welfare and Institutions, The Welfare Worker (1951):

The Winchester department of public welfare and the Frederick County department have merged their staffs, in a trial effort for one year. Mrs. Jane Gross, Superintendent of the Frederick County department, will serve as Superintendent of the combined staffs.

From Douglas Fox, The New Urban Politics: Cities and the Federal Government (1972) [combined snippets]:

While the NLC [National League of Cities] and the USCM [United States Conference of Mayors] often clashed throughout their histories on policy issues, with the NLC much less sympathetic to the demands of the larger urban areas, in recent years they have drawn much closer together. In the late 1960s they merged their staffs, and anyone writing to either organization will receive a response on a letterhead with the names of both organizations. At the same time, both groups continue to exist as autonomous organizations.

From Alan Kraut & Deborah Kraut, Covenant of Care: Newark Beth Israel and the Jewish Hospital in America (2006):

The ecumenical merger that consolidated the most voluntary hospitals into on medical care entity occurred in 1988 in Minneapolis, bringing together the Episcopal, Swedish, Lutheran, Catholic, and Jewish hospitals. The consolidation had begun in 1970 when Saint Barnabas Hospital merged with the Swedish Hospital to form the Metropolitan Medical Center (MMC). In 1988, MMC, which had absorbed other voluntary hospitals, merged with the Mount Sinai Medical Center to form the Metropolitan Mount Sinai Medical Center (MSMC). The hospitals merged their staffs, while their auxiliaries and foundations continued to operate separately. But these hospitals also had financial troubles that continued after the merger.

Google Books search results indicate indicate that in U.S. English "merged their staffs" is much more common than "merged their staff," which yields a single match. From Damien Broderick, The Spike: How Our Lives Are Being Transformed By Rapidly Advancing Technologies (2002):

On Earth, in Vinge's future world, large corporations with better computers merged their staff into linkages of thousands. Is this a horrible prospect of soul death, extermination of the self? One might expect such an interpretation from a libertarian like Vinge, but in fact he suggests otherwise: ...

This is consistent with my experience. When the publisher of the computer magazine I worked on decided to combine that magazine's staff with the staff of another computer magazine that the publisher owned, the process was referred to as "merging staffs." At any rate, that situation is one in which staffs as the plural of staff appears to be correct in the sense of "in common U.S. usage."

Sven Yargs
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  • +1 Nice addition (three years ago!). There's almost a complete answer on this page - (nobody has mentioned that even in American English staff sometimes takes, and has to take plural agreement ...) – Araucaria - Him Jan 05 '19 at 23:08
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Staff (when meaning a group of employees) is a collective noun with no plural. So, it's "our staff do good work".

When referring to a group of sticks, it's "staffs" in American English and "staffs" or "staves" everywhere else.

craiga
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