Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
"Theres" possibly doesn't deserve to be here, nor did it seem worth raising a new thread, but I just hit a couple of peculiarities with this uncommon (to me) word.
My email spell checker didn't highlight "theres" when I thought it should ... until I thought about it a bit longer. Despite having thought about it, and always enthusiastic about distractions, I studied it further. Every other spell checker I've tried highlights the word.
From the OED comes this example: "In the Space-field lie innumerable other theres that never have been here."
But the OED does not offer it as an alternative to the much more common "there's" (contraction of of "there is"). Curiously, however, dictionary.com does, at least through the examples that it offers.
So I wondered if maybe the use of "theres" instead of "there's" was an Americanism ... but Merriam-Webster does not show it. |
Not an Americanism - just a very rare plural, but perfectly valid. Hardly surprising that spell-check dictionaries don't contain it.
"Theres" can never, ever be a substitute for "there's". The two usages are grammatically distinct.