I’m going to give you a few sentences, and I want you to see if you can spot the error:

“There’s so many things I have to do today.”

“There’s a lot of really good options here.”

“There’s ten things on this menu I want to order.”

Now, even if you didn’t spot the error, you probably noticed a recurring theme throughout these sentences: “there’s.”

“There’s” is absolutely a word, and it’s grammatically correct in many, many contexts! However, let’s just remind ourselves of what it means: “there is.”

Soooo let’s replace the “there’s” with “there is” in the sentences above.

“There is so many things I have to do today.”

“There is a lot of really good options here.”

“There is ten things on this menu I want to order.”

NOW I bet you see the issue immediately!

In those sentences, it should be “there are“!

If the sentence originally should have been “there are,” you can’t replace it with “there’s.”

To instantly sound smarter, you must take the extra second to say “there are” when the occasion calls for it!

Learn more in episode 16 of the Vocabbett podcast!