a savings

[hellokitty]

Hi teachers,

I'm wondering why this expression, "a savings" uses both "a" and a plural form together?
Here is an example sentence;
We hope to cut the number of personnel by 800 the first year at a savings of over 20 million dollars.

Is "a saving of..." or "savings of..." also correct?

Thanks,
Kitty

[sglowski]

Hi teachers,

I'm wondering why this expression, "a savings" uses both "a" and a plural form together?
Here is an example sentence;
We hope to cut the number of personnel by 800 the first year at a savings of over 20 million dollars.

Is "a saving of..." or "savings of..." also correct?

Thanks,
Kitty

There are other words in English that show the use of -s as a morphological (not grammatical) noun suffix. The "s" here does not indicate plurality, it indicates the word is a noun, in this case a singular noun. I'm sorry that I can't think of other examples off the top of my head, but I know they exist.

[Tdol]

I don't whether this is a difference of English variant, but a savings here sounds wrong to me- you can have things like a savings account, but here I would say a saving.

[Koronas]

In British English we say "a saving of". The use of the plural form is an Americanism, which is totally unacceptable in British English and would be marked down in an exam.

This is one case where you really need to know which version of the language you are speaking!

[sglowski]

Here are a couple of other words that use the -s ending:
politics, economics, mathematics, surroundings. The last is always plural, however.

[RonBee]

Hi teachers,

I'm wondering why this expression, "a savings" uses both "a" and a plural form together?
Here is an example sentence;
We hope to cut the number of personnel by 800 the first year at a savings of over 20 million dollars.

Is "a saving of..." or "savings of..." also correct?

It's "a savings of", and it's perfectly correct in AmE, but not BrE.