Jury was divided or Jury were divided? [duplicate]
Solution 1:
"The jury was divided" is correct. Whenever a collective noun is used, it is treated singular because it is a single group. Also, you're trying to say the group was divided, not each of the members. This is similar to "the crowd was scattered".
Note: British and American English slightly differ in other some types of nouns - for example, in British English, you would say "England are the winners", while in American English, you would say "England is not the winner"
To more specifically answer your question,
"Jury are divided" has never been used. Funnily, seeing this
shows that "jury are" has decreased dramatically since it was first used, but is on a slight rise after 2000. I still feel it is grammatically incorrect, though. And thanks to Matt Эллен for getting me interested in these graphs :)
Solution 2:
It's up to you. It seems that treating jury as a singular entity takes preference in literature, although that hasn't always been the case:
It is important to note that a group's plurality is changeable when it comes to conjugation. Sometimes we take a group to be plural, sometimes we don't. There is no rule. These all work:
- The jury is still out
- The jury are still out
- The staff are revolting
- The team is leaving the changing room
- The congregation are singing
- The management expresses its sympathy
This changes when talking about containers, because we're not referring to the contents, but the singular container:
The biscuit tin is emtpy
*The biscuit tin are empty