Recently, hopes that the European Central Bank will reach a deal to he

Would you say "India's hopes was high" or "India's hopes were high"?

While exact set of rules may be difficult to codify, a good way to test whether a noun is truly uncountable is to try making a plural out of it, since uncountable nouns generally do not have plural forms. For example, we can figure out that words such as water, sand, sugar, luggage, and furniture are uncountable, since these words do not have any corresponding plural forms (in other words, there is no such English word as waters, sands, sugars, luggages, furnitures etc.).

There may be exceptions to the above rule, but the rule broadly works for the most part.

Since the noun hopes is plural for the noun hope, we should treat hopes as a plural noun.

p.s. Our book EducationAisle Sentence Correction Nirvana discusses uncountable and countable nouns. Have attached the corresponding section of the book, for your reference.

Hello manavsaraf001,

We hope this finds you well.

To provide a bit of clarity here, the word "hope" is uncountable when it is used to refer to the emotion of hope, as emotions cannot logically be said to have multiples.

However, "hope" can also be used as a synonym "a desire" or "a want", as in something that someone wants; in this case, "hope" can also take the plural form "hopes", as it is perfectly logical that multiple things can be wanted.

We hope this helps.
All the best!
Experts' Global Team