STAR TS Translation Services Blog

Can you name a word that’s always plural?

(Answer at the bottom of post)

• Ability VS Capacity

Ability is something you can acquire, whereas capacity is something you were born with, which cannot be learned.

Capacity is also used to refer to the volume of something (e.g a room or a box).

• Complement VS Supplement

A complement is something used to complement something else, to give it something more to improve it.

Supplement is also used to complement something, but rather to supply its deficiency, make it up.

• Rare VS Scarce

Heedful writers would use rare to describe an item that’s distinctive or unusual, and use scarce to refer to something that is hard to find.

However, most dictionaries now list rare as a synonym for scarce.

Answer : Trivia.

• Contagious VS Infectious

Even when they don’t refer to medical language, these two words have quite different meanings. Contagious refers to how fast something can spread, while infectious means the irresistible quality of something.

Writing tip: use contagious to refer to unpleasant things.

• Predominant VS Predominate

These two words are often confonded in adverb forms, i.e. predominantly and predominately. However, predominant is an adjective and predominate is a verb.

Writing tip: use a mnemonic device to avoid confusing them:

The word ant is not a verb, but the word ate is. So if ate works in your sentence, you should write predominate.

• Foreword VS forward

A foreword (some people also mispell it foreward) refers to the first pages of a book; its synonym could be preface.

Forward is not a noun, but can be a verb, an averb or an adjective, e.g. “He moved forward“, “I forwarded him this e-mail“, etc.