Singular or plural for enumerations?

coding-style enumeration
Jan Aagaard picture Jan Aagaard · Aug 26, 2009 · Viewed 23.9k times · Source

Do you use singular or plural for enumerations? I think it makes best sense with plural in the declaration

enum Weekdays
{
    Monday,
    Tuesday,
    Wednesday,
    Thursday,
    Friday,
    Saturday,
    Sunday
}

... but I think it makes more sense with singular when using the type, e.g.

Weekday firstDayOfWeek = Weekday.Monday;

I read a recommendation somewhere to use singular whith regular enums and plural with flags, but I would like to hear some more pros and cons.

Answer

Matt Ruwe picture Matt Ruwe · Aug 26, 2009

Here it is straight from Microsoft:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/4x252001(VS.71).aspx

Use a singular name for most Enum types, but use a plural name for Enum types that are bit fields.

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