This type of + plural ( reason)

Question

As we all agree on, types when plural, always comes after "of" a plural noun.. Like types of cars : meaning different classes of cars. My question here is : when I want to address one type of the "types" of cars, why should make "car" not cars to be this type of car, not cars?? Another example : we have different types of students, but this type of students is the hardest to deal with?  As here I address one type of "different types " as the prepositional phrase "of students"works as an adjective for types or"type"

LPH · Answer

This is only a tendency: ngram, robe, house, student. It cannot be said that the use of the singular is wrong, this being so because too large a number of people use it and because there is nothing that defies logic in this practice.

Answered by LPH on July 15, 2021

Rosie F · Answer

In order to give Google NGrams more data to work with, I use thing(s) at the ends of phrases, rather than car(s) or student(s). Google NGrams shows that the following four types of plural are used in this order of frequency (most frequent at the top):

these types of things
these type of things
this type of things
these types of thing

I got the same order when using kind instead of type; the order is

these kinds of things
these kind of things
this kind of things
these kinds of thing

In both cases, the phrase with the adjective and both nouns all plural is the most prevalent usage by far.

This type of + plural ( reason)

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