grammatical number - Which is correct, "neither is" or "neither are"?


Bob: "Can I set the font color? Can I customize the text?"


Frank: "Neither of these options is available. Sorry!"



Is "neither is" always correct or should one use "neither are" in some cases and what are the exact rules? I tried the googles and found a big mess of this-is-why-stackexchange-exists :P



Answer



In formal usage, it should definitely be is:



Neither of these options is available.



This is the traditional rule (iirc, Fowler’s discusses this at length). However, in colloquial usage, either option is fine, and are seems to now be somewhat more common, at least on teh internets. A commenter here nicely describes the sort of thought process which probably pushes people (usually subconsciously) towards using are:



I wanted to say that “neither of us are cardplayers”, but I know that in that case, I should use “is”. But I also can’t say “neither of us is cardplayers”. So perhaps I should say “neither of us is a cardplayer” which sounds ridiculous to me. Is the conclusion that, in situations like this, one should reconstruct the sentence entirely. So I should really say something like “we aren’t cardplayers”. Fine when you’re writing, but how do you avoid getting into a tangle when talking!!



FWIW, “neither of us is a cardplayer” and “neither of us are cardplayers” both sound absolutely fine to my ear.



I don’t have time at the moment, but if someone else is in the mood for some corpus or n-gram searching (or can find someone who’s already done the research), it would be very interesting to know the history of this. Is the current shift to neither … are a real phenomenon, or is this just recency illusion?


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