Funnily enough for your example, depending on whether you are describing different types of fruit or multiples of one type of fruit, the plural of fruit may be &quot;fruit&quot;. :)<p>&gt; It also goes with the &quot;don&#x27;t put the type in the name&quot; point, which I agree with in most cases.<p>Is that a problem in practice in Python?  That&#x27;s the whole reason Perl uses different sigils to denote different types of variables, which Python specifically rejected.  Personally I prefer being able to tell if something is a collection, and which core type of collection, at a glance (barring refs).<p>That actually does allow the same name to be used as a scalar, an array and a hash, but it&#x27;s considered very bad practice.<p><pre><code>    # Valid perl, but will get you nasty looks from coworkers
    my @fruit = qw( apple banana banana apple apple mango apple mango banana );
    my %fruit;
    for my $fruit ( @fruit ) {
        $fruit{$fruit}++; # increment %fruit hash item $fruit
    }</code></pre>