In
linguistics,
measure words are words (or
morphemes) that are used in combination with a numeral to indicate an amount of something represented by some
noun. They denote a unit or measurement and are used with
mass nouns (uncountable nouns), and in some cases also with
count nouns. For instance, in
English, is a mass noun and thus one cannot say *"three muds", but one can say "three
drops of mud", "three
pails of mud", etc. In these examples,
drops and
pails function as measure words. One can also say "three
pails of shells"; in this case the measure word
pails accompanies a count noun (
shells).