Many, much and a lot of

Students often get confused as to the correct usage of 'many', 'much' and 'a lot of'.

In this post, I am going to explain how these three words are used.

'Many' is used to state the number for concrete things or things we can see and count and we do not want to specify the exact number. Hence we can say that 'There are many cows in the field.' and 'Many people can be seen exercising in the botanical garden.'

As for 'much', it is used to describe things in great amount. For example, we can say 'There is not much sugar in the bottle.' and 'I don't carry much money with me.' However, the nouns after 'much' is uncountable.

'A lot of' can be used for countable and uncountable nouns. Look at the following sentences to see what I mean.
1 There are a lot of apples sold in this stall. [apples are countable]
2 I spent a lot of time trying to sort my CDs out. [time is uncountable]