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The raw information was processed and placed into a database so the data could be accessed more quickly.
1992, Rudolf M[athias] Schuster, The Hepaticae and Anthocerotae of North America: East of the Hundredth Meridian, volume V, New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, →ISBN, page vii:
With fresh material, taxonomic conclusions are leavened by recognition that the material examined reflects the site it occupied; a herbarium packet gives one only a small fraction of the data desirable for sound conclusions. Herbarium material does not, indeed, allow one to extrapolate safely: what you see is what you get[…]
Risk is everywhere.[…]For each one there is a frighteningly precise measurement of just how likely it is to jump from the shadows and get you. “The Norm Chronicles”[…]aims to help data-phobes find their way through this blizzard of risks.
This word is more often used as an uncountable noun with a singular verb than as a plural noun with singular datum. Usage as a plural noun with a plural verb is far more common in formal contexts.
In geodetic contexts, the word is used exclusively as an uncountable with the singular datum having the plural datums to replace it.
The definition of data in the computing context is from an international standard vocabulary and is meant to distinguish data from information. However, this distinction is largely ignored by the computing profession.
E. M. Parker; R. J. Hayward (1985), “data”, in An Afar-English-French dictionary (with Grammatical Notes in English), University of London, →ISBN
Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle; Mohamed Hassan Kamil (Aug 2013), “Gender, Number and Agreement in Afar (Cushitic language)”, in 43th Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics, Leiden: Leiden University, page 2
Mohamed Hassan Kamil (2015) L’afar: description grammaticale d’une langue couchitique (Djibouti, Erythrée et Ethiopie), Paris: Université Sorbonne Paris Cité (doctoral thesis), page 307
Though some speakers use data "information" as a new singular rather than as the plural of datum(“data point”), this is generally prescribed against. This is analogous to media in Dutch, which some speakers treat as a new singular rather than as a plural of medium.
1Regional variants. 2Null morpheme. There is no absolutive enclitic for the third person singular pronoun. The disjunctives isu or isuna may also be used. 3Ergative enclitics are also used as possessive markers.
data in Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)
Some forms not commonly seen in modern Standard Swahili are absent from the table. See Appendix:Swahili verbs for more information.
References
^ Petzell, Malin (2005), “Expanding the Swahili vocabulary”, in Africa & Asia, volume 5, archived from the original on 2009-11-29, page 88 of 85-107: “There are however fully adopted words like data ‘data’ with no visible degree of phonemic substitution even though the pronunciation has gone through a certain degree of swahilisation.”
Swedish
Etymology
Borrowed from Latindata, from the plural of datum(“that which is given, information, facts at hand, a date in the calendar”).
Det är fel på datan. ― Something's wrong with the computer.
1966, Olof Johannesson (pen name of Hannes Alfvén), Sagan om den stora datamaskinen:
De första datorna var ju också mycket enkla.
The first computers were indeed very simple.
Usage notes
The first definition is rarely inflected, but most often used in its basic form. In the definite form, both neuter (datat) and common gender (datan) forms are used. For the compound indata, Google yields 440,000 hits, but only 2110 for indatan and 1200 for indatat. The Latin singular datum is not used in this sense, because it is already used for ”date (in the calendar)”.
Swedish lacked a good and short word for computer until dator was proposed in 1967. The colloquial data was used in the 1960s and is still used colloquially today, but is usually proscribed. The form dator is also the plural of data, and the plural definite forms datorerna/datorna are very similar.