ABSTRACT
Let us use the term ‘thing-words’ for all such words, using the word thing in its widest application. But a great many words do not in that way call up the idea of something possessing a certain shape or precise limits. These words are called ‘masswords’: they stand for something that cannot be counted; such ‘uncountables’ are either material and denote some substance in itself independent of form, for instance silver, quicksilver, water, butter, tea (both the leaves and the fluid), air-or else immaterial, for instance, leisure, music, traffic, success, commonsense, knowledge, and especially many “nexus-words” formed from verbs, e.g. admiration, satisfaction, refinement, or from adjectives, e.g. safety, constancy, blindness, idleness.
