what's the plural form of homework

Usage notes

• ( exercises assigned by a teacher ) The term homework generally implies that the work is mandatory and worth marks; exercises that are optional are usually referred to as practice problems , review problems , extra practice , exercises , etc.
• ( exercises assigned by a teacher ) Work of a larger scale than homework (which involves a series of relatively simple exercises) is usually referred to as an assignment or project .

Coordinate terms

Derived terms.

• bit of homework
• do one's homework
• homework club
• homework diary
• piece of homework
• the dog ate my homework

Translations

• English compound terms
• English 2-syllable words
• English terms with IPA pronunciation
• English terms with audio links
• English lemmas
• English nouns
• English uncountable nouns
• English countable nouns
• English terms with usage examples
• English terms with quotations
• English terms with rare senses
• English slang
• English euphemisms
• English endocentric compounds
• en:Education
• Pages with 1 entry
• Terms with Afrikaans translations
• Terms with Albanian translations
• Terms with Arabic translations
• Terms with Gulf Arabic translations
• Terms with Armenian translations
• Terms with Azerbaijani translations
• Terms with Bashkir translations
• Terms with Basque translations
• Terms with Belarusian translations
• Terms with Bulgarian translations
• Terms with Burmese translations
• Terms with Catalan translations
• Terms with Cantonese translations
• Terms with Mandarin translations
• Mandarin terms with redundant transliterations
• Terms with Cornish translations
• Terms with Czech translations
• Terms with Danish translations
• Terms with Dutch translations
• Terms with Esperanto translations
• Terms with Faroese translations
• Terms with Finnish translations
• Terms with French translations
• Terms with Georgian translations
• Terms with German translations
• Terms with Greek translations
• Terms with Haitian Creole translations
• Terms with Hebrew translations
• Hindi terms with non-redundant manual transliterations
• Terms with Hindi translations
• Terms with Hungarian translations
• Terms with Icelandic translations
• Terms with Indonesian translations
• Terms with Irish translations
• Terms with Italian translations
• Terms with Japanese translations
• Terms with Kazakh translations
• Terms with Korean translations
• Terms with Kyrgyz translations
• Terms with Lao translations
• Terms with Latin translations
• Terms with Lithuanian translations
• Terms with Macedonian translations
• Terms with Malay translations
• Terms with Maltese translations
• Terms with Maori translations
• Terms with Mongolian translations
• Terms with Navajo translations
• Terms with Norwegian Bokmål translations
• Terms with Persian translations
• Terms with Polish translations
• Terms with Portuguese translations
• Terms with Romanian translations
• Terms with Russian translations
• Terms with Scottish Gaelic translations
• Terms with Serbo-Croatian translations
• Terms with Slovak translations
• Terms with Slovene translations
• Terms with Spanish translations
• Terms with Swedish translations
• Terms with Tagalog translations
• Terms with Tajik translations
• Terms with Thai translations
• Terms with Turkish translations
• Terms with Ukrainian translations
• Urdu terms with redundant transliterations
• Terms with Urdu translations
• Terms with Uyghur translations
• Terms with Uzbek translations
• Terms with Vietnamese translations
• Terms with Welsh translations
• Terms with Yiddish translations

Navigation menu

Look up a word, learn it forever.

Other forms: homeworks

Any assignment you're expected to complete after school and bring back to class the next day is called homework . Many students make up excuses for not having their homework done. The "My dog ate my homework " excuse doesn't work so well in the digital age.

High school students typically have a lot of homework most days, and often that's true for younger students as well. In college, an increasing amount of school work is done outside of class, as homework (even if you do it in the library, a cafe, or a dorm). Homework originally referred to any work done at home, including cooking and cleaning. The first example of the "school work" meaning dates from the late 1880s.

• noun preparatory school work done outside school (especially at home) synonyms: prep , preparation see more see less type of: school assignment , schoolwork a school task performed by a student to satisfy the teacher

Sign up now (it’s free!)

Whether you’re a teacher or a learner, vocabulary.com can put you or your class on the path to systematic vocabulary improvement..

The Plural Forms of Words

What are the plural forms of words.

Forming the Plurals of Nouns

• 1 dog > 2 dogs
• 1 house > 2 houses
• 1 video > 2 videos
• How to form the plurals of nouns (spelling rules)
• How to form the plurals of compound nouns (e.g., mothers-in-law, Knights Templar)
• How to form the plurals of abbreviations (e.g., MOTs, L.R.S.s)

What Are the Plural Pronouns?

What Is the Plural Form of a Verb?

What Are Plural Demonstrative Determiners?

Forming the Plurals of Foreign Words

• stadium > stadia or stadiums
• datum > data
• radius > radii or radiuses
• agendum > agenda

"Plural" Also Applies to Zero

• 0 dogs (plural)
• 1 dog (singular)
• 2 dogs (plural)
• 3 dogs (plural)
• There are no alligators in the lake.

This page was written by Craig Shrives .

You might also like...

Help us improve....

Was something wrong with this page?

Use #gm to find us quicker .

Create a QR code for this, or any, page.

mailing list

grammar forum

teachers' zone

Confirmatory test.

This test is printable and sendable

expand to full page

show as slides

download as .doc

print as handout

send as homework

display QR code

What is the plural form of homework?

Homework is a mass noun and uses singular verbs. There is no plural.

To express a plural, you could use a number or similar adjective, such as "piece."

- One piece of homework

- Two pieces of homework

Add your answer:

Top Categories

• Britannica Homepage
• Ask the Editor
• Word of the Day
• Core Vocabulary
• Most Popular
• Browse the Dictionary
• My Saved Words
• homework (noun)
• Please do/finish your homework .
• She started her algebra homework .
• The candidate did his homework [=studied the issues] before the debate.

• About Us & Legal Info
• Partner Program
• Privacy Notice
• Terms of Use
• Pronunciation Symbols

• Cambridge Dictionary +Plus

Definition of homework – Learner’s Dictionary

Your browser doesn't support HTML5 audio

• Go upstairs and do your homework.
• For your homework, please do exercise 3 on page 24.
• When I finish my homework, can I watch TV?
• Get on with your homework.
• She was trying to duck out of doing her homework.

(Definition of homework from the Cambridge Learner's Dictionary © Cambridge University Press)

Translations of homework

Get a quick, free translation!

Word of the Day

to do something or go somewhere very slowly, taking more time than is necessary

Like a bull in a china shop: talking about people who are clumsy

Learn more with +Plus

• Recent and Recommended {{#preferredDictionaries}} {{name}} {{/preferredDictionaries}}
• Definitions Clear explanations of natural written and spoken English English Learner’s Dictionary Essential British English Essential American English
• Grammar and thesaurus Usage explanations of natural written and spoken English Grammar Thesaurus
• Pronunciation British and American pronunciations with audio English Pronunciation
• English–Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Simplified)–English
• English–Chinese (Traditional) Chinese (Traditional)–English
• English–Dutch Dutch–English
• English–French French–English
• English–German German–English
• English–Indonesian Indonesian–English
• English–Italian Italian–English
• English–Japanese Japanese–English
• English–Norwegian Norwegian–English
• English–Polish Polish–English
• English–Portuguese Portuguese–English
• English–Spanish Spanish–English
• English–Swedish Swedish–English
• Dictionary +Plus Word Lists
• do your homework
• Translations
• All translations

To add homework to a word list please sign up or log in.

Add homework to one of your lists below, or create a new one.

{{message}}

Something went wrong.

There was a problem sending your report.

Stack Exchange Network

Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow , the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.

Q&A for work

Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search.

What's the correct unit for homework?

Consider the case when a teacher has thirty students in the class. The noun "homework" is uncountable so he cannot say "I have thirty homeworks to grade every week." My question is that if there is any unit of homework so that the sentence "I have thirty (units) of homework to grade every week" can be valid?

• After reading the replies, I think I should make the situation more clear. I myself am a math TA. What our students need to do for homework is usually about ten exercises from the textbook. I feel if I ask another TA how much homework he needs to grade, the usual reply will be like, "I have two sections, fifteen students each, and we have one assignment every week." Since the amount of exercises is usually the same, we don't really care about it. The amount of homework to grade mainly depends on how many students we have. But I always feel this kind of reply to be very indirect. So my precisely question is if there is any way to reply the question "how much homework do you need to grade?" by saying "I need to grade thirty (units) homework every week."
• Based on what I see from the replies, I have the impression that different countries have different answers for this question. Is this true? I'm on the west coast of the US so the way in which people there answer this question is what I care about the most. But I'm still interested in knowing the difference.
• uncountable-nouns

• 7 But, Chris, you'd need to tell us what unit is important. What did you count to reach thirty? Was it questions, exercises, assignments, workbooks? Was it students or classes? Until you tell us, we don't know. –  Gary Botnovcan Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 15:21

9 Answers 9

In your example, you could use pieces , as in I have thirty pieces of homework to grade every week .

piece noun [ C ] (THING) a single object of a particular type: a piece of furniture/clothing/equipment a piece of paper (= a whole sheet) a piece of china (= an object made of china) a piece of information/advice (Cambridge Dictionary)

However, that doesn't seem particularly idiomatic to me. You could use assignments , as in homework assignments :

assignment noun [ C/U ] us ​ /əˈsɑɪn·mənt/ a particular job or responsibility given to you: [C] The homework assignment was to read Chapter 2 in our history book. (Cambridge Dictionary)

However, in my experience, it's more common to use the type of assignment instead of homework . I think the most broad term is assignment , but you could be more specific: I have 30 ______ to grade every week.

• assignments

I was very briefly a grader (or, "reader") in a related field. I can't remember exactly how I talked about it, but if someone asked me, "How much homework do you need to grade?", I would probably reply

I need to grade thirty [assignments] every week.

You could also say sets (as others have mentioned), or even submissions (more generic). I'm thinking maybe even "papers", but that's usually used with reports or essay-like works.

I don't think I would have responded in the form you supplied, "I need to grade thirty (units) homework every week." But, that's just my personal feeling of it. You can still use pieces , as mentioned earlier. It may or may not sound slightly strange to the listener, but you will be understood.

To my surprise, BrE users are reporting that pieces of homework is idiomatic to them. I did a little Ngram search , and it appears that the phrase is more common in BrE.

I'm from the West Coast (US).

• 2 I always preferred "piece of homework", so +1 –  SovereignSun Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 9:19
• 4 Pieces was the first word I thought of. (brit here) –  WendyG Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 10:56
• 2 I've often heard " homework for 30 students ", or " papers ", as in " I have 30 papers to grade this weekend ". –  Todd Wilcox Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 13:58
• 8 "Assignment" strikes me as more likely American. I don't think we ever referred to pieces of homework as "assignments" in secondary school here in Britain. Maybe my school was just weird though, it's hard to tell with this sort of thing! –  Muzer Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 14:27
• 2 Pieces of homework sounds perfectly idiomatic to me (from UK) –  Ben Commented Aug 10, 2018 at 13:08

You are given homework assignments :

[Merriam-Webster] 2 b : a specified task or amount of work assigned or undertaken as if assigned by authority • a homework assignment The students were given a homework assignment .

• @Richard The way I see it, this definition is not so precise and clear too! What about: "a piece of work that a student is asked to do" (Quoted from here , definition number 2) –  a.RR Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 14:14
• 5 If the teacher were marking 30 assignments, I'd see that as 30 sets of different homework, not 30 submissions for the same assignment. –  Lightness Races in Orbit Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 15:16
• Agreed; one assignment to 30 students would produce (up to) 30 submissions to grade. –  chepner Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 18:19
• In Toronto, especially in high school, we always got homework assignments. They weren't called anything else. –  Jason Bassford Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 20:30
• 1 Hmm everyone I knew when I TA'd in the US would more than happily use "homeworks". Not sure if they would write since I've never had occasion to need that but in casual speech it seems completely acceptable. I wonder how many would have actually reported it as ungrammatical. –  DRF Commented Aug 10, 2018 at 13:45

You pick a different noun that is more flexible yet appropriate.

I have thirty reports to grade. I have thirty assignments to mark.

• 2 Also problem sets or essays. –  user3067860 Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 13:29

You're asking about the teacher's workload in evaluating the homework that has been returned.

I think the word 'sets' is what you're looking for.

I have 30 sets of math homework to grade, and I still have 8 sets of geography homework from yesterday that I'm not done with.

set (MW, noun definition 2)

a number of things of the same kind that belong or are used together

The dictionaries don't seem to have caught up yet but, as somebody who regularly sets and marks homework in a university in the UK, I would quite happily refer to "marking 30 homeworks". A comment on another answer says that this is also used in the US.

So, at least for informal use, I think it's fine to use homework as a countable noun and pluralize it. If you wanted to be more formal, I'd go with my usual cowardly solution of rewording to avoid the problem: "I have to grade 30 students' homework" or "I have to grade homework for 30 students."

• 1 I agree, but interestingly, if I were a student and had a math assignment, a history assignment, and an English assignment, I'd never say "I have three homeworks to do." –  thumbtackthief Commented Aug 10, 2018 at 21:21

I suggest you use the word exercise . It's one of the most frequently used words in this meaning(=homework) & it's countable too.

Well, there are other simple ways:

For homework , you're going to finish thirty exercises every week.

In other words:

Do Exercises 3, 4, 5 etc on pages 51, 52, 53 etc for homework .

If you are student you can say:

My science teacher always sets a lot of homework. The teacher told us to do thirty exercises for homework.

If you are teacher you can also say:

For homework I want you to do thirty exercises.

• 1 But if you set thirty exercises as homework then one 'unit' of homework would be thirty exercises, so 'exercise' isn't the unit for 'the homework received from one pupil'. –  Pete Kirkham Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 15:01
• @PeteKirkham All in all, " One exercise " can be a " Piece of homework " or " A part of assignment " . So I definitely disagree with you. –  a.RR Commented Aug 9, 2018 at 15:43
• 2 Probably an American thing, but "my teacher sets a lot of homework" sounds very weird to me. I would always use the verb "gives." I also agree with @PeteKirkham; to me, "exercise" only refers to a part of an assignment and not the assignment as a whole. –  Doorknob Commented Aug 10, 2018 at 14:35
• @Doorknob "Set" seems very normal to me in British English so, yes, this probably is a US/UK thing. –  David Richerby Commented Aug 10, 2018 at 16:07
• This is incorrect. If the teacher has set 30 exercises to each of 30 students, then they have 900 exercises to mark but only 30 units of homework. "Exercise" and "homework" are not synonyms: one's homework is the total work one has been set to do at home and that may consist of multiple exercises, as your answer makes clear. –  David Richerby Commented Aug 10, 2018 at 16:09

I'd quantify it by the amount of students whose homework you have to grade.

"I have homework of 30 students to grade this weekend"

• 2 Or, more simply, "30 students' homework". With your phrasing, I think you need the definite article, "I have the homework of 30 students to grade this weekend." –  David Richerby Commented Aug 10, 2018 at 16:00

At MIT, most courses assign homework in " problem sets ".

A typical engineering student has to do four problem sets per week: one for each course that he or she is enrolled in.

A typical TA (Teaching Assistant) has to grade dozens of problem sets per week: one for each student in his (or rarely her) recitation section(s).

A typical problem set consists of several problems.

Some courses (especially in Technical Writing and the Humanities) require students to write weekly essays, instead of solve weekly problem sets.

'30 sets of homework' perhaps.

But 'I've got 30 homeworks to mark' doesn't sound wrong.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for browse other questions tagged nouns uncountable-nouns ..

• Featured on Meta
• Bringing clarity to status tag usage on meta sites
• Announcing a change to the data-dump process

Hot Network Questions

• Is this schematic ready to be made into a circuit?
• Does it make sense for the governments of my world to genetically engineer soldiers?
• Does a representation of the universal cover of a Lie group induce a projective representation of the group itself?
• How to change upward facing track lights 26 feet above living room?
• How to load a function from a Vim9 script and call it?
• Creating Layout of 2D Board game
• Getting an UK Visa with Ricevuta
• What is an overview of utilitarian arguments in support of exclusive relationships?
• What is the difference between passing NULL vs. nullptr to a template parameter?
• Is loss of availability automatically a security incident?
• Why am I having problems starting my service in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8?
• Why are poverty definitions not based off a person's access to necessities rather than a fixed number?
• What rules of legal ethics apply to information a lawyer learns during a consultation?
• Is there more evidence for god than for Russell’s teapot?
• In what instances are 3-D charts appropriate?
• What are the most commonly used markdown tags when doing online role playing chats?
• Why are IBM's basis gates not linearly independent?
• Can Christian Saudi Nationals visit Mecca?
• Was the term " these little ones" used as a code word for believers?
• Is it a date format of YYMMDD, MMDDYY, and/or DDMMYY?
• Whats the safest way to store a password in database?
• How do I apologize to a lecturer
• Directory of Vegan Communities in Ecuador (South America)
• is xindy under use/development?

• Rules/Help/FAQ Help/FAQ
• Members Current visitors
• Interface Language

Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.

Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.

• Spanish-English / Español-Inglés
• Spanish-English Vocabulary / Vocabulario Español-Inglés

homework", singular or plural?

• Thread starter J_Ariel
• Start date Nov 12, 2008
• Nov 12, 2008

Hi everyone, got a little problem: I know the word "homework" is uncountable, but in a passive sentence like "Homework have been made?", would it be "have" or "has"? I think it would be "have", but that would mean it's countable. Or, though uncountable, "homework" is plural??? Thanks a lot  

Senior Member

In most cases that I can think of homework(s) with an 's' would sound wierd. It I am sure is used once in a while but I believe in most if not all cases it would be without 's'.  

Wynn Mathieson

It would be "Homework has been DONE" (<-- N.B. not "made"). Use of the passive voice does not alter the singularity of the mass-noun "(home)work".  

Basil Ganglia

As I learned English growing up ''Homework'' was always singular. I have heard my children and some of their friends use ''homeworks'', however. In this usage, each homework assignment from a different class or teacher was a separate "homework''. I consider ''homeworks'' to be substandard English, but it's certainly not unknown.