take action vs take actions (2025)

Today, I said:
We must take immediate actions to stop the violence.

Then a friend corrected me and said I should say "take immediate action", not "actions". I asked him why, he just said that's how it's said in English.

Is my friend right? There are many things, or actions, we can do, like increasing penalty for violent crimes, and education. When there are many things we can do, should we still use singular "action"?

I personally use the expression in the singular 'take action' even to mean that different measures are to be taken. This is because 'action' is generally considered as an uncountable noun. I know, however, that it is correct to say 'We must take immediate actions to stop violence.'

We don't want to take actions that would contribute to the further militarization of Syria (USA Today)

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There's ways to identify the people who have the highest propensity to be involved in gun violence and take actions to try and prevent the next shooting and that's what we're going to do, concentrating on the people, places and things that are the root causes of gun violence in this city. (NBC_Dateline)

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EdisonBhola said:

So even USA_today as quoted above made a mistake?

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I wouldn't say it's a mistake, but it sounds unnatural because it's rarely used (whether in BrE or AmE), as mentioned in post # 2 because 'action' is generally considered as an uncountable noun.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=take+action%2Ctake+actions&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ctake%20action%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ctake%20actions%3B%2Cc0

I've found very few examples in the BNC too.

We continued to take actions in the first quarter to strengthen our product line, consolidate manufacturing and development resources and reduce our overall workforce.

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Attention must be given to ways in which pressure groups secure or resist policies through their power to take actions that directly affect either the success of policies or the stability of the political system.

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Just to add to the discussion, I asked my Korean friend who has lived in USA for many years, he said "take actions" is right.

Maybe "take actions" is AmE and "take action" is BE.

"We need to take five actions" Not idiomatic in this context.
"We need to do five things."

But
"The mechanism is complex. This lever that I am pointing to causes five separate actions to be performed ..."

Thus an action is a discrete set of events: The action of catching a ball is
(i) See the ball arriving
(ii) reaching out the arms for the arriving ball
(iii) bringing together the hands
(iv) opening the hands in order to receive the ball
(v) receiving the ball
(vi) closing the hands.