The form of a noun that typically denotes more than one person, thing, or instance. Contrast with singular.
Although the English plural is commonly formed with the suffix -s or -es, the plural of some nouns (such as sheep) is identical in form to the singular (see zero plural), while some other nouns (such as dust) have no plural form.
See also:
- Plural Forms of English Nouns
- A Quick Quiz on Tricky English Plurals
- Count Noun
- Mass Noun
- Number
- Plurale Tantum
- Pronoun Agreement
- Subject-Verb Agreement
Etymology:
From the Latin, "more"Examples and Observations:
- The Brain: Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Pinky: I think so, Brain, but if the plural of mouse is mice, wouldn't the plural of spouse be spice?
(Pinky and the Brain, 1995) - "Media, the plural of mediocrity."
(Jimmy Breslin) - "Now, y'all is plural. Believe me, I use the word a lot."
(Nick Stokes in "Fannysmackin'." CSI, 2006) - "The two champions for variations in plurals are octopus and rhinoceros. The two most obvious plurals of octopus are octopuses and (incorrectly since the root is Greek, not Latin) octopi. The proper Greek plural is octopodes--so three possible plurals for octopus. Similarly for rhinoceros, we have rhinoceroses, rhinoceri (incorrectly), rhinoceros (presumably pronounced differently from the singular) and (an obsolete but correct form) rhinocerotes. In fact, rhinoceros is the English word with the most possible plural forms: four in all.
"Even more confusingly, one word may be the plural form of two different singular words. So bases means more than one of both base and basis, and ellipses can refer to both ellipse and ellipsis. The winner in this category is axes, which is the plural of ax, axe and axis."
(Richard Watson Todd, Much Ado About English: Up and Down the Bizarre Byways of a Fascinating Language. Nicholas Brealey, 2006) - "In his song One Hippopotami, the comedian Alan Sherman sang, 'The plural of "half" is "whole"; the plural of "two minks" is "one mink stole."' It is an astute observation. The linguist Peter Tiersma has found that whenever a set of objects can easily be construed as a single assemblage, a regular plural is in danger of congealing into a mass noun or an irregular plural. This is happening today to the noun data, which often refers to large quantities of information and which is easily conceived of as stuff rather than things; the word is turning from a plural (many data) to a mass noun (much data). . . .
"Nonstandard dialects are filled with double plurals such as oxens, dices, lices, and feets, and that is how we got the strangest plural in Standard English, children. Once it was childer, with the old plural suffix -er also seen in the German equivalent Kinder. But people stopped hearing it as a plural, and when they had to refer to more than one child, they added a second plural marker, -en. Today many rural and foreign speakers still don't think of children as plural, and have added a third suffix, yielding the triply plural childrens."
(Steven Pinker, Words and Rules, Basic Books, 1999)
The English Lesson (author unknown)
Now if mouse in the plural should be, and is, mice,
Then house in the plural, of course, should be hice,
And grouse should be grice and spouse should be spice
And by the same token should blouse become blice.
And consider the goose with its plural of geese;
Then a double caboose should be called a cabeese,
And noose should be neese and moose should be meese
And if mama's papoose should be twins, it's papeese.
Then if one thing is that, while some more is called those,
Then more than one hat, I assume, would be hose,
And gnat would be gnose and pat would be pose,
And likewise the plural of rat would be rose.
