Countable equipment

MollyB   Fri Dec 12, 2008 3:04 pm GMT
Can the noun "equipment" be countable?
Another Guest   Sat Dec 13, 2008 4:28 am GMT
No, although "pieces of equipment" can be.
Lazar   Sat Dec 13, 2008 9:06 pm GMT
No. There are some uncountable nouns that can be counted in rare circumstances (e.g. if you were talking about varieties of pasta found in Tuscany, I guess you could say "the pastas of Tuscany"), but I can't think of any situation where you could say "equipments".
Achab   Sun Dec 14, 2008 6:57 am GMT
"Okay my friend, we've been playing for over a month now and I can say that I evaluated your chess strenght. Now, according to my assessment, if you really want to improve you'll need two equipments. A computer on which you can run some chess software and a collection of books or rook endings."

What do you think?

Um, I'm not sure about it myself. I believe "two kinds of equipment" would do better.

Quizzically,

Achab
Achab   Sun Dec 14, 2008 8:26 am GMT
A little typo alert. In my posting above I should have written "books ON rook endings" instead of "books or rook endings". Apologies.

Achab
Billy   Mon Dec 15, 2008 7:39 am GMT
Good work Achab
Lazar   Mon Dec 15, 2008 7:43 am GMT
Achab: No, that doesn't sound natural to me (even assuming that I would describe books as equipment, which I don't think I would). I think I would just say "two things".