plastics
- 1Plural of plastic.
Manufacturers test a range of plastics before settling on one for the bottle.
Recyclers must separate the plastics by type to avoid contaminating each batch.
Note
The counted form of a material that usually goes uncounted. You make something out of plastic, with no plural. Plastics appears when the material is split into kinds, such as thermoplastics and thermosets, or the candidates a manufacturer weighs for a bottle. In manufacturing and recycling, the plural is the natural word, because the kinds behave differently and have to be kept apart.
- 2The field of plastic surgery, especially considered as a professional specialty.
After her residency, she chose plastics over general surgery.
A career in plastics demands years of additional specialized training.
Note
Despite the final -s, this is a singular, uncountable noun: plastics is a competitive specialty, not plastics are. It names the field the way one names a career choice, usually with no article, as in she went into plastics. Keep it apart from the plural for kinds of material: a sentence about residents and training points here, while one about bottles and recycling points there.
plastics is a form of plastic
plastic, noun: A synthetic, solid material made from hydrocarbon-based polymers, able to be molded into lasting shapes. Full entry
- Forms
- plasticplastics plural
- Spelling
- plastic → plastics: add -s
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /s/.
Use it in a sentence
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