Comment 9 for bug 1670268

dictionary.com is an American site, so I doubt that this is specific to British English. It's possible that you might need to talk to linguistics majors rather than English majors, though, since in many places English courses don't have the same focus on syntax and grammar that you often find in linguistics courses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun gets rather technical but has a good summary near the top: "In English, mass nouns are characterized by the fact that they cannot be directly modified by a numeral without specifying a unit of measurement, and that they cannot combine with an indefinite article (a or an)." For example, you can say "two fish" but not *"two software" (or *"two softwares").

I hope we can at least agree (as Marcus does above) that if it takes us the best part of ten comments to get this far then the paragraph is a dead loss to clarity and should be rewritten.