Furniture is countable in Danish, so the word I wrote means “piece of furniture”.
It’s actually really weird that furniture is uncountable in English. Most other uncountable nouns make sense—you can’t really count how many milks you have. I wonder how it came to be that something so tangible is uncountable in English?
Danish: møbel (2), stol (1), lænestol (3)
Furniture is countable in Danish, so the word I wrote means “piece of furniture”.
It’s actually really weird that furniture is uncountable in English. Most other uncountable nouns make sense—you can’t really count how many milks you have. I wonder how it came to be that something so tangible is uncountable in English?
It’s not unusual for category nouns to be uncountable precisely because they are category nouns. For example, “clothing”, “food”, “cutlery”, etc.
It’s probably uncountable in English because the original meaning was the “act of furnishing.”
and yet the closely related word “furnishings” is always plural.