Hi,
Please could you explain the difference between ‘work’ and ‘a piece of work’? Are they synonyms?
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Depending on the context ‘a piece of work’ can you be an idiom meaning ‘a difficult person to get along with’ such as ‘Frank is quite a piece of work. He is very moody and changes his mind all the time’.
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Usually the word work is a non count noun. It is not pluralized. When we tend to singularize its meaning, we may say it is a piece of work.
However, when it is used to refer to literary products like plays, poems, stories, novels etc, we make it plural because they are some author’s own creations, as we see when we say The works of Shakespeare. Here it can be plural.
As regards the idiomatic expression explained by Torsten, it is a new, interesting usage for me in English although it is rarely used in the same sense in some Indian languages as well.
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Thank you very much for your help!
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Apart from the idiomatic use that Torsten referred to, ‘a piece of work’ can often refer to a job that has been completed that is of high quality. It’s the sort of comment that e teacher might make about a student’s project or essay as in- That’s a good piece of work, Michael/Lily, you will get a high mark for that.
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Thank you, Alan, for your reply!
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