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In Cambridge Dictionary, syrup is marked as an uncountable noun and there is no entry of it being countable. Quite contrary, in one of the examples of "syrup" in Cambridge Dictionary it has been written that:

1 Make a syrup by boiling 100 g sugar in 300 ml water.

Why they have written "a syrup" while they have marked it as uncountable ?

Shouldn't it be :

2 Make syrup by boiling 100 g sugar in 300 ml water.

or:

3 Make a kind of syrup by boiling 100 g sugar in 300 ml water.

alireza
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    If they say a syrup, it is clearly countable. – Lambie Nov 12 '22 at 16:24
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    More generally, it is common to use an indefinite article ("a" or "an") to mean "a kind of"; for example, it would be totally unremarkable to say "tequila is an alcoholic drink" even though, strictly, it is a kind of alcoholic drink. This might be an example of metonymy, where something is identified using a word related to it rather than directly. – kaya3 Nov 13 '22 at 20:43

2 Answers2

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When a noun is 'uncountable', it means that any given instance of that noun cannot be counted. If you have a jar of syrup, you can't specify the quantity by counting.

However, you can count instances of the noun:

e.g. "The chef had three syrups, raspberry, cherry, and gooseberry."

Note that the types must be different. You would not say, for example:

"The chef had three syrups: two raspberry and one blackcurrant"

PRL75
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    Can we also say "The chef had three kinds of syrups, raspberry, cherry, and gooseberry."? – alireza Nov 12 '22 at 14:46
  • @alireza yes. Also three flavours of syrup. – mdewey Nov 12 '22 at 15:09
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    @alireza yes, Point being, with uncountable nouns, if we use them as countable, it usually means different types, the same as if we had said, "types of syrup". – gotube Nov 12 '22 at 16:16
  • @gotube Good point. Answer edited. – PRL75 Nov 12 '22 at 17:45
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    Oil is uncountable, but oils are (e.g. essential oils) for a similar example. – user_1818839 Nov 12 '22 at 22:40
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    Saying "two raspberry syrups" makes total sense in some contexts, if those syrups are different. –  Nov 12 '22 at 23:45
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    Hey! I bought seven raspberry syrups, for the week ahead, not two. Who has been nicking my raspberry syrups? – JdeBP Nov 12 '22 at 23:57
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    You could also refer to ‘a syrup’ in the (fairly obscure) sense of a wig. (Rhyming slang: ‘syrup of figs’ = ‘wig’.) – gidds Nov 12 '22 at 23:59
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    @Nij Also in the case where they can be treated as individual units--consider the phrase "tea with two sugars", for instance. To use the word syrup, perhaps someone at a fast food restaurant would order their breakfast with three syrups, meaning three packets of syrup (as the syrup at fast food restaurants comes in disposable packets of standardized size). – Hearth Nov 13 '22 at 02:36
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    Yeah, they don't have to be different types. That would only be if we were talking about types of syrup in the abstract (the way we'd talk about species of animals) in a way independent of any instances of those types. We are instead talking about portions of syrup, and we are calling a distinct portion of syrup "a syrup," no matter its type. The original question was about the instruction, "Make a syrup by boiling 100 g sugar in 300 ml water." Even if you already had some syrup on hand of the same type, the result of following this instruction would still be to make "a syrup." – causative Nov 13 '22 at 16:12
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It's not really about syrups being required to have different types. Ironically, a 19th century dictionary exemplifies this quite well:

SYRUP: A SYRUP is a solution of sugar in water, previously impregnated by decoction, or infusion, with the medicinal virtues of some vegetable from whence it is named. [...] Syrups are bad preparations for children, on account of the sugar disordering the stomach and bowels by becoming acid.

— A Practical Dictionary of Domestic Medicine., Richard Reece. 1808.

"A syrup" here is about an (arbitrary) instance of a syrup, rather than about type.

It's about "syrup" being one of those nouns, like "paste", "lunch", "liquid", and "cake", that sometimes is countable and sometimes is not. If it helps, the word comes from the Arabic word for "drink", and "drink" is also a noun that sometimes is countable and sometimes is not.

Observe the variability between countable and uncountable: Just as I can drink a syrup each morning I can also eat a cake for lunch (syrup being a breakfast favourite, and cake being a staple of my packed lunches), keeping my syrups in the refrigerator and my cakes in a cupboard, and preparing a lunch each morning.

This does not imply multiple types of syrup and cake, as they could all be raspberry and Battenberg for all that you know, just multiple instances of them.

This is actually a dictionary problem. While the Cambridge Dictionary says uncountable, other dictionaries (e.g. Britannica, Collins) put this noun into the countable+uncountable class.

JdeBP
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    Cake and syrup are linguistically different here. Say that I have three chocolate cakes and three bottles of one kind of syrup. It would be correct for me to say that I ate three cakes. It would not be as natural for me to say that I drank three syrups. It would be more natural for me to say that I drank three bottles of syrup. That being said, as a native speaker I could see someone asking someone else to go to the store to retrieve "two maple syrups", but that's a pretty colloquial usage that implies that the speaker is referring in shorthand to a specific bottle of a known size on sale. – Maximillian Laumeister Nov 13 '22 at 00:20
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    To me, the phrase "keeping my syrups in the refrigerator" does imply multiple types of syrup. Upon hearing that phrase without additional context, I would definitely assume that the speaker enjoys multiple flavors/types of syrup - perhaps a sugar-sweetened syrup, a pure maple, and an agave. – Maximillian Laumeister Nov 13 '22 at 00:25
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    Finally, if you "drink a syrup" every morning (which is indeed grammatically natural phrasing), I would say that the implied meaning is to "drink (a type of) syrup" rather than "drink (a container of) syrup". That contrasts with the scenario where you "eat a cake", which implies to "eat (one) cake" rather than to "eat (a type of) cake". – Maximillian Laumeister Nov 13 '22 at 00:29