Universal grinder

In linguistics, universal grinder is the idea that in some languages, most count nouns can be used as if they were mass nouns, which causes a slight change in their meaning. The term "universal grinder" was first used in print by F. Jeffry Pelletier in 1975, after a personal suggestion by David Lewis.^[1]

Related concepts, the universal sorter and universal packager refer to similar processes that allow mass nouns to be used as count nouns.