English plurals


English plurals include the plural forms of English nouns and English determiners. This article discusses the variety of ways in which English plurals are formed from the corresponding singular forms, as well as various issues concerning the usage of singulars and plurals in English. For plurals of pronouns, see English personal pronouns.
Phonological transcriptions provided in this article are for Received Pronunciation and General American. For more information, see English phonology.

Meaning

Although the everyday meaning of plural is "more than one", the grammatical term has a slightly different technical meaning. In the English system of grammatical number, singular means "one ", and plural means "not singular". In other words, plural means not just "more than one" but also "less than one ". This less-than aspect can be seen in cases like the temperature is zero degrees and 0.5 children per woman.

Form

Regular plurals

The plural morpheme in English is a sibilant suffixed to the end of most nouns. Regular English plurals fall into three classes, depending upon the sound that ends the singular form:

Any sibilant

In English, there are six sibilant consonants:,,,,, and. When a singular noun ends in one of these sounds, its plural is spoken by appending or . The spelling adds -es, or -s if the singular already ends in -e:

Other voiceless consonants

In most English varieties, there are five non-sibilant voiceless consonants that occur at the end of words:,,,, and ; some varieties also have. When the singular form ends in a voiceless consonant other than a sibilant, the plural is normally formed by adding . The spelling adds -s:
Some that end in or, however, are "near-regular". See section [|below].

Other voiced phonemes

For a singular noun ending on a non-sibilant voiced consonant, the plural adds and the spelling adds -s:
In English, all vowels are voiced. Nouns ending in a vowel sound similarly add to form the plural. The spelling usually adds -s, but certain instances may add -es instead:
Plurals of nouns in ''-o'' preceded by a consonant
Singular nouns ending in o preceded by a consonant in many cases spell the plural by adding -es :
However, many nouns of foreign origin, including almost all Italian loanwords, add only -s:

Plurals of nouns in ''-y''

Nouns ending in a vocalic y preceded by a consonant usually drop the y and add -ies :
Words ending in quy also follow this pattern, since in English qu is a digraph for two consonant sounds or sometimes one :
However, proper nouns of this type usually form their plurals by simply adding -s: the two Kennedys, there are three Harrys in our office. With place names this rule is not always adhered to: Sicilies and Scillies are the standard plurals of Sicily and Scilly, while Germanys and Germanies are both used. Nor does the rule apply to words that are merely capitalized common nouns: P&O Ferries.
Other exceptions include lay-bys and stand-bys.
Words ending in a y preceded by a vowel form their plurals by adding -s:
However, the plural form of money is usually monies, although moneys is also found. Also, the plural of trolley can be either trolleys or trollies, although the former is more common.

Plurals of nouns in ''-i''

Nouns written with -i usually have plurals in -is but some in -ies are also found.

Near-regular plurals

In Old and Middle English, voiceless fricatives and mutated to voiced fricatives /v/ and /ð/ respectively before a voiced ending. In some words this voicing survives in the modern English plural. In the case of changing to, the mutation is indicated in the orthography as well; also, a silent e is added in this case if the singular does not already end with -e:
In addition, there is one word where is voiced in the plural:
Many nouns ending in or nevertheless retain the voiceless consonant:
Some can do either:

Irregular plurals

There are many other less regular ways of forming plurals, usually stemming from older forms of English or from foreign borrowings.

Nouns with identical singular and plural

Some nouns have identical singular and plural. Many of these are the names of animals:
  • bison
  • buffalo
  • carp
  • cod
  • deer
  • fish
  • kakapo
  • neat
  • pike
  • salmon
  • sheep
  • shrimp or shrimps
  • squid
  • trout
As a general rule, game or other animals are often referred to in the singular for the plural in a sporting context: "He shot six brace of pheasant", "Carruthers bagged a dozen tiger last year", whereas in another context such as zoology or tourism the regular plural would be used. Eric Partridge refers to these sporting terms as "snob plurals" and conjectures that they may have developed by analogy with the common English irregular plural animal words "deer", "sheep" and "trout". Similarly, nearly all kinds of fish have no separate plural form. As to the word fish itself, the plural is usually identical to the singular, although fishes is sometimes used, especially when meaning "species of fish". Fishes is also used in iconic contexts, such as the Bible story of the loaves and fishes, or the reference in The Godfather, "Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes." The plurals of the names of fishes either take the ending -s or is the same as the singular.
Other nouns that have identical singular and plural forms include:
Many names for Native American peoples are not inflected in the plural:
  • Cherokee
  • Cree
  • Comanche
  • Delaware
  • Hopi
  • Iroquois
  • Kiowa
  • Navajo
  • Ojibwa
  • Sioux
  • Zuni
Exceptions include Algonquins, Apaches, Aztecs, Chippewas, Hurons, Incas, Mohawks, Oneidas, and Seminoles.
English sometimes distinguishes between regular plural forms of demonyms/ethnonyms, and uncountable plurals used to refer to entire nationalities collectively.
Certain other words borrowed from foreign languages such as Japanese and Māori are "correctly" not inflected in the plural, although many people are not aware of this rule; see below.

Plurals in ''-(e)n''

The plurals of a few nouns are formed from the singular by adding -n or -en, stemming from the Old English weak declension. Only the following three are commonly found:
As noted, the word "children" comes from an earlier form "childer". There were formerly a few other words like this: eyre/eyren, lamber/lambren, and calver/calveren.
An interesting example may be found embedded in the name of the London parish of Clerkenwell, which derives its name from being the Clerks' Well associated with the Clerkenwell Priory of the Knights Hospitaller.
The following -n plurals are found in dialectal, rare, or archaic usage:
The word box, referring to a computer, is sometimes pluralized humorously to boxen in hacker subculture, by analogy to oxen. In the same context, multiple VAX computers are sometimes called Vaxen, particularly if operating as a cluster. Multiple Unix systems are sometimes referred to as Unix boxen, or may be called Unices along the [|Latin model].

Apophonic plurals

The plural is sometimes formed by changing the vowel sound of the singular :
This group consists of words that historically belong to the Old English consonant declension, see. There are many compounds of man and woman that form their plurals in the same way: postmen, policewomen, etc.
The plural of mongoose is mongooses or sometimes mongeese. Mongeese is a back-formation by analogy to goose / geese and is often used in a jocular context. The form meese is sometimes also used humorously as the plural of moose—normally moose or mooses—or even of mouse.

Miscellaneous irregular plurals

Some words have irregular plurals that do not fit any of the types given here.
  • person—''people
  • die—dice
  • penny—pence''

    Irregular plurals from foreign languages

Irregular plurals from Latin and Greek
English has borrowed a great many words from Classical Latin and Classical Greek. Classical Latin has a very complex system of endings in which there are five categories or declensions of nouns, adjectives, and pronouns. Usually, in borrowing words from Latin, the endings of the nominative are used: nouns whose nominative singular ends in -a have plurals in -ae ; nouns whose nominative singular ends in -um have plurals in -a.
Classical Greek has a simpler system, but still more complicated than that of English. Most loan words from Greek in English are from Attic Greek, not Demotic Greek, Koine Greek, or Modern Greek. This is because Attic Greek is what is taught in classes in Greek in Western Europe, and therefore was the Greek that the word borrowers knew.
Anglicisation
The general trend with loanwords is toward what is called Anglicisation or naturalisation, that is, the re-formation of the word and its inflections as normal English words. Many nouns have settled on, or acquired a modern form from the original. Other nouns have become Anglicised, taking on the normal "s" ending. In some cases, both forms are still competing.
The choice of a form can often depend on context: for a scholar, the plural of appendix is appendices ; for some physicians, the plural of appendix is appendixes. Likewise, a radio or radar engineer works with antennas, but an entomologist deals with antennae. The choice of form can also depend on the level of discourse: traditional Latin plurals are found more often in academic and scientific contexts, whereas in daily speech the Anglicised forms are more common. In the following table, the Latin plurals are listed, together with the Anglicised forms when these are more common.
Different paradigms of Latin pronunciation can lead to confusion as to the number or gender of the noun in question. As traditionally used in English, including scientific, medical, and legal contexts, Latin nouns retain the classical inflection with regard to spelling; however, those inflections use an Anglicised pronunciation: the entomologist pronounces antennae as. This may cause confusion for those familiar with the Classical Latin pronunciation. The words alumni and alumnae are notorious in this regard, as alumni in Anglicised pronunciation sounds the same as alumnae in Classical Latin pronunciation, and vice versa.
Because many of these plurals do not end in -s, some of them have been reinterpreted as singular forms: particularly the words datum and medium, where the original plurals data and media are now, in many contexts, used by some as singular mass nouns: "The media is biased"; "This data shows us that ...". See below for more information. Similarly, words such as criteria and phenomena are used as singular by some speakers, although this is still considered incorrect in standard usage.
Final -a becomes -ae, or just adds -s:
Scientific abbreviations for words of Latin origin ending in -a, such as SN for supernova, can form a plural by adding -e, as SNe for supernovae.
Final -ex or -ix becomes -ices, or just adds -es:
Final -is becomes -es or -ises/-ides:
Except for words derived from Greek polis, which become poleis :
Some people treat process as if it belonged to this class, pronouncing processes instead of standard. Since the word comes from Latin processus, whose plural in the fourth declension is processūs with a long u, this pronunciation is by analogy, not etymology. Axes, the plural of axis, is pronounced differently from axes, the plural of ax.
Final -ies remains unchanged:
Specie for a singular of species is considered nonstandard. It is standard meaning the form of money, where it derives from the Latin singular ablative in the phrase in specie.
Final -um becomes -a, or just adds -s:
Final -us becomes -i or -era or -ora, or just adds -es :
Final -us remains unchanged in the plural :
Colloquial usages based in a humorous fashion on the second declension include Elvii to refer to multiple Elvis impersonators, and Loti, used by petrolheads to refer to Lotus automobiles in the plural.
Some Greek plurals are preserved in English :
Final -on becomes -a:
Final -as in one case changes to -antes:
Final -ma in nouns of Greek origin can become -mata, although -s is usually also acceptable, and in many cases more common.
Such -ata plurals also occur in Latin words borrowed from Greek, e.g. poemata. The a is short in both languages.