Contexts where a word ending with "s" is not necessarily plural.

[Karsee]

Hello. I was just wondering about this, but would it be true to say there are contexts in which a word can end with an s, despite only referring to a single thing? For example, if I tell someone "here is a paper which lists all the countries I've visited", and only a single country is written on the paper, the initial statement still seems prima facie to not be misguiding. The point of this is that despite it being in plural form, the reference of the word is only a single object. Hopefully this question isn't silly, but i'm just curious: Do we accept the conclusion, and that a word in "plural form" can seemingly only refer to a single object (atleast within the context above), or is there a deeper grammatical flaw within the statement?

Thanks alot!

 

[jutfrank]

It's not unusual in philosophy and mathematics to talk about having a set including only one member, so yes, you can do that too in your situation. However, in such a non-academic context, the listener would be surprised to see only one country on the list, given your misleading words 'all' and 'countries'. But I assume that's exactly why you'd want to do that, right? For some kind of comic effect?