Number Unlike gender, the grammatical concept of singular or plural (‘number’) causes no problem for speakers of English. Occasionally (as in English) a singular noun is used to refer to a collective entity that one might expect to be grammatically plural, e.g. la gente ‘people’. On the other hand, some objects that are singular in English may be plural in Italian, e.g. le lasagne ‘lasagne’ or i capelli ‘hair’.