yes, tcr - or should I say Tom? I pruned our word list with an automated process that zapped anything that looked like a plural formed by adding
s to the end of another word. Then I added back some words like
news, that shouldn't really have been dropped. However, I missed some such cases.
Actually, the case of
nones is different from that of
lauds.
The latter can be a form of the verb
laud, for example a news headline from February 2008: "D’Amato Lauds McCain's Stance on Iraq". In fact, it looks like the vast majority of hits when searching on
lauds (in corpora or newspaper indexes) are of this type. This is why the word falls foul of our "plurals" rule - which includes verb inflections made by adding
s.
However, in the case of
nones, it seems that the canonical hour meaning is by far the most common one. Apparently the word did originate from the addition of s to an archaic noun
none (pronounced to rhyme with
bone) meaning "the last part of the day, lasting from about 3 p.m. to 6 p.m." However I'm happy to disregard this archaic sense of
none.
To complicate matters further, it appears that
none is sometimes used instead of
nones, but this is not a case of singular and plural - both words are used with exactly the same meaning, and both may be treated as singular, according to the Shorter Oxford.
Honesty compels me to mention one example I found where
nones was used as a plural of
none in the sense of "not any", in an April 2008
restaurant review in the
Denver Post:
The stop-start pace of the meal, with plates arriving in twos and threes, then ones, then nones, made me feel like I didn't know what I was doing, which I didn't.
But this must be classed as a nonce usage (as well as a
nones usage).
To sum up, when we see the word
nones, it is almost certainly being used as a word that has no singular form
none in contemporary usage. (Whereas, when we see the word
lauds, it is most likely a form of the verb
laud.) So
nones should be added to our word list.
