Funky Plurals
(8-minute read)
This week, I’ve felt embarrassed by my own lacking intelligence. I’ve played music ever since I can remember, and even toured around Europe with various orchestras. I’m also a copyeditor and linguistics enthusiast. So how did I never realise that opera is the plural of opus?
Okay, I was also today years old when I learned that lasagne is the plural of lasagna, but I don’t feel so bad about that considering how much my body hates gluten.
Plurals in English are weird. One house becomes two houses, but one mouse becomes two… mice? Why can’t we just keep it simple? Why can’t we just chuck an ‘s’ on the end and call the job done? We have many irregular plurals in English, and even to native speakers they can seem ridiculous and nonsensical. But if we look, we quickly find patterns and can usually trace even the most bizarre sounding irregular plurals back to their roots, explaining their seeming funkiness.
Modern English is derived from many different languages. We get most of our words either from Old French, directly from Latin, or from the Germanic language of Old English.
Our most regular plurals end in the letter ‘s’. This may be attributed to the heavy French influence English has seen, but the Germanic language of Old English also used ‘s’ endings for plurals, so it’s unsurprising that the ‘s’ has survived in common use. But this is English we’re talking about, so it was never going to be that simple; even our ‘regular’ plurals have a variety of suffixes (dolly/dollies, glass/glasses, mug/mugs, half/halves, etc.).
The French influence also gave us a few confusing variations which have remained to this day. In French, the adjective comes after the noun (the horse white rather than the white horse); these are called postpositive adjectives, and they exist in English too because we borrowed a bunch from (Norman) French. What does this mean for plurals? Well, it means we sometimes need to go against our linguistic instincts in cases where the noun comes first: cul-de-sac becomes culs-de-sac, femme fatal becomes femmes fatal, and attorney general becomes attorneys general.
Our Germanic roots provide most of our everyday words. We have these roots to thank for plurals where we find changed vowel sounds (foot/feet, mouse/mice, man/men) as well as ‘en’ endings (children, oxen, etc.). But through frequent use, many of our Germanic-rooted words have become anglicised over time and adopted one of the standard ‘s’ endings in their plural form.
Our Latin roots put another spin on the ‘es’ ending with words such as index/indices, appendix/appendices, and crisis/crises. They also give us ‘um’ words which become ‘a’ words when pluralised (millennium/millennia, curriculum/curricula); ‘a’ words which become ‘ae’ words (vertebra/vertebrae, formula/formulae); and ‘us’ words which become ‘i’ words (cactus/cacti, alumnus/alumni).
But no matter its origin, language is known for giving in to the path of least resistance. We might assume octopus is Latin because it ends in ‘us’, so we might pluralise it to octopi. It’s actually Greek, so if you wanted to stick to the etymologically correct plural ending, you’d call them octopodes (pronounced oct-o-poh-dees). As speakers though, we tend to go for the easiest option linguistically. Since the speakers of a language are the dictators of its ultimate ‘correctness’, the word of least resistance – that which is in most frequent use – is the word that eventually finds itself in the dictionary. So we end up with octopuses.
Sometimes, it’s the singular forms that feel uncomfortably irregular, such as the singular die (plural dice). In some cases, we refuse to adopt these odd singulars at all – I’ve never heard an English speaker ordering a panino, for example (the singular form of the more commonly used panini, which is technically plural; note also confetto/confetti and spaghetto/spaghetti). These lesser-used variations are gradually lost to time.
Of course, language oddities are often the product not of conscious objection but instead of simple human-error. The word cherry, for example, came from the French cherise. When English speakers heard this word, they incorrectly assumed since it ended in an ‘s’ sound it must be the plural form of the word cherry. This mistake resulted in the English plural cherries rather than what could have been cherises. There are countless examples of simple mistakes shaping language across the world.
In conclusion, plurals are weird. Sometimes, words don’t change in the plural (sheep, deer and moose remain sheep, deer and moose); other times, words remain forever plural (scissors, trousers, binoculars). Spelling can vary between English-speaking countries (e.g., buses in Britain become busses in America). And some things just don’t make sense! Tomato becomes tomatoes, but avocado becomes avocados (without the added ‘e’), despite their roots being in common. English is a huge melting pot of languages stirred over centuries, so its makeup is unsurprisingly complex.
Often, the only etymological explanation is rather generically that language gets beaten into shape and constantly changed by its speakers. Language is everchanging. Your grandparents would have been correct by prescriptionist standards to have pluralised roof to rooves, a plural form no longer found in dictionaries. Speakers are the dictionaries of the future! Say what feels right and know that your language use is interesting, telling, packed with history, and never really wrong.