A Word, Please: Singular or plural? Making the best choice with the conjunction ‘or’

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about English grammar and usage — most of which I promptly forgot. And not for lack of use. Every day I apply what I’ve learned to catch and fix writers’ mistakes. Yet I regularly find myself stumped by some language or editing conundrum whose answer I used to know.

Here’s an example: “How to know if you or a loved one have coverage.” When I came across a sentence like this recently, I didn’t notice the verb. Nor did I notice the verb in a nearly identical phrase that appeared later: “How to know if you or a loved one has coverage.” Eventually I saw they were different. “Have,” in the first example, is conjugated for the second-person singular subject: “you have.” In the second example, “has” is conjugated for the third-person singular: “a loved one has. ”

I’ve tackled these “or” situations hundreds of times over the years. But this time I just couldn’t remember which one was correct. So I had to brush up on the rules.

As I relearned, the answer isn’t simple. “Or” is unique among conjunctions because the way it joins nouns has a different meaning than the way its fellow conjunction “and” joins nouns. When a compound subject contains “and,” it’s easy to make the verb match: You and a loved one have coverage. By nature, “and” makes singular things plural: Ned is. Nancy is. Ned and Nancy are. It’s obvious you need the plural verb.

“Or” is similar to “and” — it’s a conjunction that can join nouns. But instead of combining the nouns to form a plural subject, it excludes one of the nouns. It tells you that either the first or the second noun applies to the verb, but not both: Ned is. Nancy is. Ned or Nancy is.

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When both nouns joined by “or” are singular, the verb form is easy: It’s singular, as we saw in “Ned or Nancy is.” When both nouns joined by “or” are plural, the verb is plural: “Coyotes or dogs are.”

But when one is singular and one is plural, which one governs the verb? “Coyotes or the dog is digging in the yard”? Or “Coyotes or the dog are digging in the yard”?

There’s no formal rule, but there’s a clear standard. When “or” joins nouns of different number “the principle of proximity tends to be called in, and the verb agrees with the nearest noun,” according to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. So it would be correct to say, “Coyotes or the dog is digging in the yard.”

If you switch the order of nouns, that would change the verb: “The dog or coyotes are digging in the yard.” Whichever noun is closest to the verb governs it.

That may seem arbitrary, but it’s as good a system as any I could invent. We don’t know whether the dog is digging in the yard or coyotes are digging in the yard. It’s anybody’s guess. So you might as well use the verb that sounds better.

A longer, more convoluted example better illustrates the wisdom of this system: “I or the many people who visit your home every year with their spouses and children am responsible for the stain on your carpet.” If we were to insist that the verb match the first noun, you’d need “am” to correspond to “I.” But the plural noun that follows, “people,” modified by all the other plural stuff like “spouses” and “children,” moves you so far away from the “I” subject that “am” would sound ridiculous.

So while there’s no rule the requires you to make the verb match the nearest noun, it’s clearly the best choice. I’ll try to remember that.

June Casagrande is the author of “The Joy of Syntax: A Simple Guide to All the Grammar You Know You Should Know.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.

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