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It seems that people overwhelmingly prefer to write

Which type of nuts are the healthiest?

to

Which type of nuts is the healthiest?

However, type is singular, so why isn't is the correct choice?

Edit if you type these sentences with quotes into Google (phrase search), you'll see that the first one occurs about 3000 times on the web, and the second one basically never.

tchrist
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MWB
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  • Can you show some evidence of this overwhelming preference? – Jim Jun 09 '19 at 06:45
  • @Jim see update – MWB Jun 09 '19 at 07:44
  • Please add the link. Because I get 16 results and... – Mari-Lou A Jun 09 '19 at 09:44
  • ... I get 33 results for "which type of nuts are" this appears to not support your claim. – Mari-Lou A Jun 09 '19 at 09:48
  • @Mari-LouA when I click on your first link, Google says "About 3,060 results (0.36 seconds)" but it only shows 1.5 pages of results. If I replace "are" with "is", there are no results aside from those linking this page. So 3,000 seems in error (by Google), but there are still more usages of the first version. – MWB Jun 09 '19 at 11:59
  • OK, so where's the link that shows the 3,000 hits? – Mari-Lou A Jun 09 '19 at 12:11
  • @Mari-LouA You can't compare "which type of nuts are" to "which type of nuts is the healthiest" -- the number of words changes. – MWB Jun 09 '19 at 12:14
  • You claimed, and I quote "you'll see that the first one [i.e. Which type of nuts are the healthiest?] occurs about 3000 times on the web," Reducing the number of words from 7 to 5 should actually increase the number of hits. The essential elements are "type of nuts" and "are", it doesn't matter what adjective follows. I could ask ‘Which [type of] nut(s) are the best/most expensive/cheapest’ the search item would include all of the variants "Which type of nuts are + adjective superlative" – Mari-Lou A Jun 09 '19 at 13:31
  • @Mari-LouA well you reduced it in one case and failed to reduce it in another. Disingenuous, wasn't it? I already explained the 3000 above. – MWB Jun 09 '19 at 17:06

1 Answers1

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You could always change the sentence so that it's not so confusing:

1. Which type of nut is the healthiest?
2. Which types of nut are the healthiest?

Note that nut remains singular in both cases, making subject-verb agreement easy. (It's when you use the plural nuts that things get awkward.)

Jason Bassford
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  • The meaning is not preserved though. Suppose there are two types. I might want to know which type is the healthiest. – MWB Jun 09 '19 at 05:40
  • Yes, I would probably go so far as to suggest that the phrase "type of nuts" , is not, in itself, idiomatic. One is speaking of a collective - like "breed of dog, species of ant, etc." "Which type of nut is..." is the obvious route to go. – WS2 Jun 09 '19 at 07:58
  • @MaxB If there are two types, that's why types is plural. (You actually pluralized it in your own sentence.) The of X is extraneous to the actual subject, which is type or types. There is one type. There are two types. – Jason Bassford Jun 09 '19 at 13:06