He is one of the boys who is/are missing

English as a Second Language
1

He is one of the boys who are missing.
He is one of the boys who is missing.

Which is the grammatically correct sentence?

Thanks.

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The first one is correct. Since I wasn’t quite sure I went to look it up: ‘are’ agrees with the plural noun boys.

I hope this helps.

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That is right. “Boys ARE missing” and he is one of them"

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I’ll just point out that the word ‘who’ changes things. Consider the difference between the following:

One of the boys is/are missing
One of the boys who is/are missing

The first one is clearly referring to a particular boy. Then stating he is missing. This is singular.

The second one is not as clear, and not everyone agrees on it. Rather than directly saying the boy is missing, you are saying he is among the group of boys who are missing.

As I said, not everyone agree on this. There may also be a difference between AmE and BrE.

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