Which is correct: "There are not any employees" or "There is not any employee"?

grammaticality grammatical-number there-is

Sometimes I see two variants of following sentence:

  • "there are not any employees" in the department
  • "there is not any employee" in the department

What is the correct sentence?


As long as you are referring to more than one subject, I would go with:

There are not any employees in the department.

For referring to a single instance, I would go with "there is no"

There is no employee in the department.

If the topic has no plural form (or is rarely used with a plural form), then I would consider "there isn't any":

"There isn't any water" = There is no water


I'd use

There are no employees.


"There are not any employees" is the correct one.

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