Nouns with no plurals: Sweet spot

Some nouns have rarely-used plurals.

I’ve purchased domain names to start businesses, and I’ve talked to lots of entrepreneurs when they were selecting their domain names. In some cases, they have their eye on a great one or two-word domain name.

A question inevitably comes up, particularly for nouns: what regarding the plural/singular? If I use this great domain for my business, will a competitor use the singular/plural version of it for their business?

It’s a legitimate issue. Sure, you can start a business on car.com. But someone else will start one on cars.com, and there will likely be some confusion.

Some nouns don’t have a natural plural, though. They are only spoken one way in practice.

An example is my domain name CandyCorn.com. If you eat a handful of candy corn, you say you “ate candy corn”, not “ate candy corns”. So if someone wants to use CandyCorn.com as a brand for their marketing firm, a name for their app, or something else, they don’t have to worry regarding also securing the plural version.

“Candy corn” has 20 million+ results, “Candy corns” just 370k.

This is one reason I like my recent purchase of Shortbread.com. Again, while you could say shortbreads, it’s a rarely used form of the word with regarding a half-million results in Google. The singular version has 28 million results.

It’s somewhat rare to find nouns that are almost exclusively used one way or the other. But when you come across one, it’s worth paying extra for them.