Type of something

Question

Cheese is an ingredenient used to prepare many types of dishes- salads, desserts, soups, breakfast dishes. Can I say "types of dishes" refering to soups, desserts? Or is there another noun?  Does "type of sth" go with singular always?

GPY · Accepted Answer

MariaAnnaKCheese is an ingredient used to prepare many types of dish - salads, desserts, soups, breakfast dishes.

Opinions vary about "types of + plural noun" versus "types of + singular noun". To me personally, the plural noun seems illogical. It seems to me that to pluralise "type of + singular noun" we logically only need to pluralise the head noun, "type", not both nouns. In careful writing I would advocate the singular, possibly with certain special-case exceptions. As I say, opinions vary.

Your punctuation style "dish- salads" is wrong. First of all, the hyphen should properly be a dash (– or —). In careful writing these punctuation marks should always be distinguished. In casual typing many people type a hyphen instead of a dash – mostly either for convenience (because a proper dash is harder to type) or, in many cases, simply because people do not understand the difference. Some people type two hyphens ("--") to simulate a dash. This is a practice that arose in the days of ASCII, which does not have a separate dash character. If, in casual typing, you choose to use a hyphen for convenience, you must at least put spaces around it, i.e. "dish - salads", not "dish- salads".

Type of something

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