Hi Sana,

That’s an interesting point; I’d start by saying that seems like an unusual rule for the dictionary to establish and I doubt many native English speakers would use different grammar depending on whether a couple is married or unmarried. “Couple” is a word that most people would agree should, grammatically, be treated as singular, but it’s also one of those where people can be quite flexible in practice, so “rules” like that which attempt to explain it aren’t really very helpful…

But your example sentence is a specifically interesting one because the confusion really stems from combining a singular group noun, “couple”, with a qualifying plural, “newlyweds”. This makes both singular and plural sound correct or incorrect depending on how you want to look at it! I’d argue that because we have “newlyweds” we really need a plural verb, as it must refer to more than one person (we couldn’t say the “couple was newlywed”; you could say “the couple was newly wed” but that carries a different meaning!), but we wouldn’t expect to see a plural with “couple” typically, so it might be best just to reword the sentence.

Now that I’ve come this far to be honest this might be another interesting one for an article, because it could rather get into issues about how important it is to be “correct” in this situation! But in the meantime I do have a few more plural articles that might help with such considerations: https://englishlessonsbrighton.co.uk/?s=plural

Phil

The Japanese couple on the back of the couch was obviously newly -weds.

But when I checked my result my sentence was marked incorrect .and the below mentioned sentence was considered correct :

The Japanese couple at the back of the coach were obviously newly -weds .

Aslo as you know mostly we use singular verb with the collective noun. Please help me to clear this confusion.