Words of other types, such as verbs, adjectives and pronouns, also frequently have distinct plural forms, which are used in agreement with the number of their associated nouns.
However, in English and many other languages, singular and plural are the only grammatical numbers, except for possible remnants of dual number in pronouns such as both and either, and in tendency for stock phrases to use "two" as an umbrella term for "many" (eg "double jeopardy" includes prosecuting a person three, four or a dozen times on the same charge).
However, numbers besides singular, plural, and (to a lesser extent) dual are extremely rare.
Languages with numerical classifiers such as Chinese and Japanese lack any significant grammatical number at all, though they are likely to have plural personal pronouns.
A greater plural refers to an abnormally large number for the object of discussion.
For example, in discussing oranges, the paucal number might imply fewer than ten, whereas for the population of a country, it might be used for a few hundred thousand.
Also some nouns may follow different declension patterns when denoting objects which are typically referred to in pairs.
For example, in Polish, the noun "oko", among other meanings, may refer to a human or animal eye or to a drop of oil on water.
Biblical Hebrew had grammatical dual via the suffix -ạyim as opposed to ־ים -īm for masculine words.
Ghil'ad Zuckermann uses the term superplural to refer to massive plural.
He argues that the Australian Aboriginal Barngarla language has four grammatical numbers: singular, dual, plural and superplural.
[1]: 227–228 For example: A given language may make plural forms of nouns by various types of inflection, including the addition of affixes, like the English -(e)s and -ies suffixes, or ablaut, as in the derivation of the plural geese from goose, or a combination of the two.
Such a word may in fact have a number of plural forms, to allow for simultaneous agreement within other categories such as case, person and gender, as well as marking of categories belonging to the word itself (such as tense of verbs, degree of comparison of adjectives, etc.)
The same applies to some determiners – examples are the French plural definite article les, and the English demonstratives these and those.
Thus it is frequently used with numbers higher than one (two cats, 101 dogs, four and a half hours) and for unspecified amounts of countable things (some men, several cakes, how many lumps?, birds have feathers).
Common fractions less than one tend to be used with singular expressions: half (of) a loaf, two-thirds of a mile.