So you’ve just bought your latest vinyl to add to your stacks of vinyls that stoke the magic in your life.
But, wait a minute. What’s this word ‘vinyls’? Is that even a word? It’s ‘vinyl’ for one record and ‘vinyls’ for all the others, isn’t it? Or is it?
If you’ve been roundly rubbished for your talk of vinyls or even if you’re the one doing the ridiculing – shame on you - then you might be curious. So which is it, folks? Vinyl or vinyls? Do you care? Does anyone care? Does it even matter?
Such is the power of that little letter ‘s’, that debate has long raged among music lovers and grammar nerds over whether it belongs in the world of vinyl records or not. All the while, our language continues to evolve just as vinyl record production technology continues to do too.
The vinyl/vinyls debate across the internet boasts passionate devotees on both sides of the argument. It’s a debate that will likely educate you and confuse you.
It’ll tell you that vinyl is a mass noun because it refers to the material that records are made from rather than the individual discs. That multiple records are vinyl records, records or LPs. Or that more one vinyl is still two or more vinyls. That the word vinyls is acceptable when it refers to different types of vinyls or a collection of vinyls. In other words, you don’t have to look too far to find back up your choice of plural.
The USA’s Gold Rush Vinyl in the Austin Texas, posted this in November 2023. “In this long standing debate, almost every linguist agrees that the strict preference for vinyl being accepted over vinyls comes from within the record collecting community itself, more specifically from the re-emerged vinyl scene.”
Historically, there are written references to the word vinyls dating back to the 1950s, in the years before the vinyl that replaced wax records in 1939, fell out of fashion. This is proof, says Gold Rush, that the movement declaring that ‘the plural of vinyl is vinyl’ is a modern phenomenon. But that hasn’t stopped the fans of vinyls taking action to have their preferred plural formalised.
In March 2016, the website change.org that describes itself as ‘The
World’s Platform for Change’ launched a petition to change the plural of vinyl to
vinyls. It read, “There is a small but vocal cabal among the vinyl enthusiast community
who seek to control the language of our hobby via bullying and ridiculing those
who use the term ‘vinyls’ to describe 2 or more units of vinyl recorded media. In an effort to promote inclusiveness, we
would like to have the term ‘vinyls’ enshrined as the official plural term for
vinyl recorded media.”
The petition’s two aims were to respect the grammatically correct language and to annoy pedantic collectors for ridiculing rather than encouraging fellow collectors especially those new to the following.
The UK’s largest vinyl pressing plant, The Vinyl Factory in London ridiculed the petition with its headline, “The plural of vinyl is still vinyl”. In the same way that sheep, fish and deer are not sheeps, fishs or deers, it noted.
Just days later, Vice.com that describes itself as “the definitive guide to enlightening information” commented by floating the notion that the publishers of the Oxford University Dictionary just might ultimately change its reference to vinyls. The publisher Oxford University Press replied they would update the word if evidence from resources such as the Oxford English Corpus suggested the word was being used differently. “We will not change a definition solely because we or others believe a word should be used differently.”
At this point, the petition had attracted 35 signatures, well short of its goal of 100. Nothing more was reported on the matter which clearly dramatically lacked the credibility required for the Oxford wordsmiths to sharpen their editing pencils.
As for your vinyl/vinyls, we say just take your pick and get on with enjoying your music. And try not to pick a fight over something as silly as a little letter ‘s’.