Clearly both, as your examples demonstrate. Sometimes we use it as a mass noun, sometimes as a count noun.

 

Dick Veit

 

Hello:

 

I would be grateful for your thoughts as to whether or not embarrassment is a countable or uncountable noun or both. In the phrase “to protect the State Department from political embarrassment” it seems to me to be an uncountable noun; yet in the phrase “an embarrassment of riches,” embarrassment follows the property of a countable noun, i.e., it can be modified by the indefinite article.

 

Can one say I faced several embarrassments as opposed to I faced several kinds of embarrassment? i.e., embarrassment as a count noun is an instance of embarrassment whereas embarrassment as a noncount noun is the state of being embarrassed? And is there a reliable resource for checking the status of common nouns?

 

Thanks for your thoughts—

 

Natalie Gerber

SUNY Fredonia