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Spoken English > Which is the correct sentence? The staff are on...
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Which is the correct sentence? The staff are on leave today. The staff is on leave today.

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Tutor

Hi Manoj interesting question, see, staff meaning here a group of people together(became single or unity) and u have also mentioned The, it means u r particularly showing a staff, there is no one like this in the world. So your second sentence is correct I think.
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English Trainer

Between the above captioned sentences, second sentence is correct as 'the staff' is considered as one team i.e a single unit or you may consider this as singular subject here and a singular subject takes a singular verb i.e 'is'.
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Tutor

The staff is on leave today because staff is a single group.
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E-Tutor for Spoken English, French and Communication

Oh wow. This is tricky because "staff" is a collective noun. Unfortunately, this means that it is an "it depends" situation. Now, in the above sentence, "staff" acts as a single unit (meaning that every member of the staff is doing the same thing, i.e., every member of the staff is on leave as a whole,...
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Oh wow. This is tricky because "staff" is a collective noun. Unfortunately, this means that it is an "it depends" situation. Now, in the above sentence, "staff" acts as a single unit (meaning that every member of the staff is doing the same thing, i.e., every member of the staff is on leave as a whole, thereby acting together as a single unit). So the correct version would be "The staff is on leave today." However if they weren't all on leave and acting as a single unit, then "are" is used. For example, consider the same sentence slightly changed: "Most of the staff are on leave today." or "Some of the staff are on leave today." See the difference? Here, all the staff members are not doing the same thing; only a certain number of people in the group are on leave. Hence, since they don't act together as a single unit here, "are" is used after the collective noun "staff". Hope this helps. :) read less
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Japanese Language Trainer

Don't think that the burden is less. It's more challenging.
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M.A.

I -think both are incorrecct. staff is a collective noun .You should say members of the staff are on leave.
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Teacher for all subjects.

The staff is on leave today.
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Trainer

The staff is on leave today is the correct one. Also you can write - "The staff members are on leave today"
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Oracle, Hindi, C++, C, MS Office, VBScript,JavaScript,Spoken English etc with 32 years of experience

The staff are on leave today.
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Both are correct.
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