In linguistics, measure words are words that are used in combination with a numeral to indicate an amount of something represented by some noun. Measure words are used with mass nouns (uncountable nouns) and, in some cases, count nouns to denote a unit or measurement. For example, mud is a mass noun in English, so you can't say "three muds," but you can say "three drops of mud," "three pails of mud," and so on. Drops and pails are used as measure words in these examples. In some languages, the term measure word is also used to refer to numeral classifiers, which are used with count nouns. When saying "three people," for example, no additional word is needed in English, but in many East Asian languages, a numeral classifier is added, just as a measure word is added in English for uncountable nouns.

Arun Karthik

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