English plurals


s are inflected for grammatical number, meaning that if they are of the countable type, they generally have different forms for singular and plural. This article discusses the variety of ways in which English plural nouns 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.

Form

Regular plurals

The plural morpheme in English is suffixed to the end of most nouns. Regular English plurals fall into three classes, depending upon the sound that ends the singular form:
Where a singular noun ends in a sibilant sound—,,,, or —the plural is formed by adding or . The spelling adds -es, or -s if the singular already ends in -e:
When the singular form ends in a voiceless consonant —,,, and sometimes and —the plural is formed by adding. The spelling adds -s:
Thus, singular forms that end in a voiceless consonant are pluralized with the voiceless consonant /s/, and singular forms that end in a voiced phoneme or a sibilant are pluralized with the voiced consonant /z/. So, for all other words the regular plural adds, represented orthographically by -s:
Phonologically, these rules are sufficient to describe most English plurals. However, certain complications arise in the spelling of certain plurals, as described [|below].

Plurals of nouns in ''-o''

With nouns ending in o preceded by a consonant, the plural in many cases is spelled 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:
However, nouns of this type which are proper nouns 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: Germanys and Germanies are both used, and Sicilies and Scillies are the standard plurals of Sicily and Scilly. 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 plurals 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:
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."
Other nouns that have identical singular and plural forms include:
Many names for Native American peoples are not inflected in the plural:
Exceptions include Algonquins, Apaches, Aztecs, Black Hawks, 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.
The following -n plurals are found in dialectal, rare, or archaic usage:
The word box, referring to a computer, is occasionally pluralized humorously to boxen in the hacker subculture. In the same context, multiple VAX computers are sometimes called Vaxen particularly if operating as a cluster, but multiple Unix systems are usually Unices along the [|Latin model].

Apophonic plurals

The plural is sometimes formed by simply 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. Mongeese is a back-formation by mistaken 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.

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 -m have plurals in -a. Sometimes forms other than the nominative are seen: in partibus infidelibus, which is the plural dative.
Classical Greek had a simpler system, but still more complicated than that of English. Note that 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 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 /ænˈtɛni/. This may cause confusion for those familiar with the Classical Latin pronunciation /ænˈtɛnaɪ/. The words alumni and alumnae are notorious in this regard, as alumni in Anglicised pronunciation sounds the same as alumnae in Italianate pronunciation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Colloquial usages based in a humorous fashion on the second declension include Elvii to refer to multiple Elvis impersonators and Loti, used by to refer to Lotus automobiles in the plural.
Some Greek plurals are preserved in English :
Such -ata plurals also occur in Latin words borrowed from Greek, e.g. poemata. The a's are both short in both languages.
Irregular plurals from other languages
See also below.
Foreign terms may take native plural forms, especially when the user is addressing an audience familiar with the language. In such cases, the conventionally formed English plural may sound awkward or be confusing.
Ot is pronounced os in the Ashkenazi dialect.
Other nouns such as kimonos, ninjas, futons, and tsunamis are more often seen with a regular English plural.
Notes:
The majority of English compound nouns have one basic term, or head, with which they end. These are nouns and are pluralized in typical fashion:
Some compounds have one head with which they begin. These heads are also nouns and the head usually pluralizes, leaving the second, usually a post-positive adjective, term unchanged:
It is common in informal speech to pluralize the last word instead, like most English nouns, but in edited prose aimed at educated people, the forms given above are usually preferred.
If a compound can be thought to have two heads, both of them tend to be pluralized when the first head has an irregular plural form:
Two-headed compounds in which the first head has a standard plural form, however, tend to pluralize only the final head:
In military usage, the term general, as part of an officer's title, is etymologically an adjective, but it has been adopted as a noun and thus a head, so compound titles employing it are pluralized at the end:
For compounds of three or more words that have a head with an irregular plural form, only that term is pluralized:
For many other compounds of three or more words with a head at the front—especially in cases where the compound is ad hoc or the head is metaphorical—it is generally regarded as acceptable to pluralize either the first major term or the last :
With a few extended compounds, both terms may be pluralized—again, with an alternative :
With extended compounds constructed around o, only the last term is pluralized :
See also the [|Headless nouns] section below.

French compounds

Many English compounds have been borrowed directly from French, and these generally follow a somewhat different set of rules. French-loaned compounds with a head at the beginning tend to pluralize both words, according to French practice:
but:
For compounds adopted directly from French where the head comes at the end, it is acceptable to pluralize either both words or only the last:
Notes:
A distinctive case is the compound film noir. For this French-loaned artistic term, English-language texts variously use as the plural films noirs, films noir and, most prevalently,film noirs. The 11th edition of the standard Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary lists film noirs as the preferred style. Three primary bases may be identified for this:
  1. Unlike other compounds borrowed directly from French, film noir is used to refer primarily to English-language cultural artifacts; a typically English-style plural is thus unusually appropriate.
  2. Again, unlike other foreign-loaned compounds, film noir refers specifically to the products of popular culture; consequently, popular usage holds more orthographical authority than is usual.
  3. English has adopted noir as a stand-alone adjective in artistic contexts, leading it to serve as the lone head in a variety of compounds.

    Plurals of letters and abbreviations

The plural of individual letters is usually written with -'s: there are two h's in this sentence; mind your p's and q's; dot the i's and cross the t's.
Some people extend this use of the apostrophe to other cases, such as plurals of numbers written in figures, words used as terms. However others prefer to avoid this method, and write 1990s, buts; this is the style recommended by The Chicago Manual of Style.
Likewise, acronyms and initialisms are normally pluralized simply by adding -s, as in MPs, although the apostrophe is sometimes seen. Use of the apostrophe is more common in those cases where the letters are followed by periods, or where the last letter is S.
English can form a plural of certain one-letter abbreviations by doubling the letter: p., pp.. Other examples include ll., ff., hh., PP., SS., ss. , vv.. Some multi-letter abbreviations can be treated the same way, by doubling the final letter: MS, MSS ; op., opp..
However, often the abbreviation used for the singular is used also as the abbreviation for the plural; this is normal for most units of measurement and currency. The SI unit symbols are officially not considered abbreviations and not pluralized, as in 10 m.

Headless nouns

In The Language Instinct, linguist Steven Pinker discusses what he calls "headless words", typically bahuvrihi compounds, such as lowlife and flatfoot, in which life and foot are not heads semantically; that is, a lowlife is not a type of life, and a flatfoot is not a type of foot. When the common form of such a word is singular, it is treated as if it has a regular plural, even if the final constituent of the word is usually pluralized in an irregular fashion. Thus the plural of lowlife is lowlifes, not "lowlives", according to Pinker. Other proposed examples include:
An exception is Blackfoot, of which the plural can be Blackfeet, though that form of the name is officially rejected by the Blackfoot First Nations of Canada.
Another analogous case is that of sport team names such as the Miami Marlins and Toronto Maple Leafs. For these, see below.

Defective nouns

Plurals without singulars

Some nouns have no singular form. Such a noun is called a plurale tantum. Examples include cattle, thanks, clothes.
A particular set of nouns, describing things having two parts, comprises the major group of pluralia tantum in modern English:
These words are interchangeable with a pair of scissors, a pair of trousers, and so forth. In the American fashion industry it is common to refer to a single pair of pants as a pant—though this is a back-formation, the English word was originally singular. In the same field, one half of a pair of scissors separated from the other half is, rather illogically, referred to as a half-scissor. Tweezers used to be part of this group, but tweezer has come into common usage since the second half of the 20th century.
Nouns describing things having two parts are expressed in the singular when used as adjectives. Other pluralia tantum remain unchanged as adjectives.
There are also some plural nouns whose singular forms exist, though they are much more rarely encountered than the plurals:
Notes:

Singulars without plurals

s do not represent distinct objects, so the singular and plural semantics do not apply in the same way. Some examples:
Notes:
Some mass nouns can be pluralized, but the meaning in this case may change somewhat. For example, when I have two grains of sand, I do not have two sands; I have sand. There is less sand in your pile than in mine, not fewer sands. However, there could be the many "sands of Africa"—either many distinct stretches of sand, or distinct types of sand of interest to geologists or builders, or simply the allusive The Sands of Mars.
It is rare to pluralize furniture in this way and information is never pluralized.
There are several isotopes of oxygen, which might be referred to as different oxygens. In casual speech, oxygen might be used as shorthand for "an oxygen atom", but in this case, it is not a mass noun, so one can refer to "multiple oxygens in the same molecule".
One would interpret Bob's wisdoms as various pieces of Bob's wisdom, deceits as a series of instances of deceitful behaviour, and the different idlenesses of the worker as plural distinct manifestations of the mass concept of idleness.
The pair specie and species both come from a Latin word meaning "kind", but they do not form a singular-plural pair. In Latin, specie is the ablative singular form, while species is the nominative form, which happens to be the same in both singular and plural. In English, species behaves similarly—as a noun with identical singular and plural—while specie is treated as a mass noun, referring to money in the form of coins.

Singulars as plural and plurals as singular

Plural words becoming singular

Plural in form but singular in construction
Certain words which were originally plural in form have come to be used almost exclusively as singulars ; for example billiards, measles, news, mathematics, physics, etc. Some of these words, such as news, are strongly and consistently felt as singular by fluent speakers. These words are usually marked in dictionaries with the phrase "plural in form but singular in construction". Others, such as aesthetics, are less strongly or consistently felt as singular; for the latter type, the dictionary phrase "plural in form but singular or plural in construction" recognizes variable usage.
Plural form became a singular form
Some words of foreign origin are much better known in their plural form, and are often not even recognized by English speakers as having plural form; descriptively, in English morphology many of these simply are not in plural form, because English has naturalized the foreign plural as the English singular. Usage of the original singular may be considered pedantic, hypercorrective, or incorrect. In the examples below, the original plural is now commonly used as a singular, and in some cases a regular English plural has been formed from it.
Magazine was derived from Arabic via French. It was originally plural, but in French and English it is always regarded as singular.
Other words whose plurals are sometimes used as singulars include:
Notes:

Back-formation

Some words have unusually formed singulars and plurals, but develop "normal" singular-plural pairs by back-formation. For example, pease was in origin a singular with plural peasen. However, pease came to be analysed as plural by analogy, from which a new singular pea was formed; the spelling of pease was also altered accordingly, surviving only in the name of the dish pease porridge or pease pudding. Similarly, termites was the three-syllable plural of termes; this singular was lost, however, and the plural form reduced to two syllables. Syringe is a back-formation from syringes, itself the plural of syrinx, a musical instrument. Cherry is from Norman French cherise. Phases was once the plural of phasis, but the singular is now phase. The nonstandard, offensive, and now obsolete Chinee and Portugee singulars are back-formations from the standard Chinese and Portuguese.
Kudos is a singular Greek word meaning praise, but is often taken to be a plural. At present, however, kudo is considered an error, though the usage is becoming more common as kudos becomes better known. The name of the Greek sandwich style gyros is increasingly undergoing a similar transformation.
The term, from Latin, for the main upper arm flexor in the singular is the biceps muscle ; however, many English speakers take it to be a plural and refer to the muscle of only one arm, by back-formation, as a bicep. The correct—although very seldom used—Latin plural is bicipites.
The word sastrugi is of Russian origin and its singular is sastruga; but the imagined Latin-type singular sastrugus has sometimes been used.

Geographical plurals used as singular

Geographical names may be treated as singular even if they are plural in form, if they are regarded as representing a single entity such as a country: The United States is a country in North America. However, if the sense is a group of geographical objects, such as islands or mountains, a plural-form name will be treated as plural: The Hebrides are a group of islands off the coast of Scotland.

Singulars with collective meaning treated as plural

Words such as army, company, crowd, family, fleet, government, majority, mess, number, pack, party and team may refer either to a single entity or the members of the set composing it. If the latter meaning is intended, the word may be treated as if it were a plural, in that it may take a plural verb and be replaced with a plural pronoun: the government are considering their position. See synesis.
Thus, as H. W. Fowler describes, in British English they are "treated as singular or plural at discretion"; Fowler notes that occasionally a "delicate distinction" is made possible by discretionary plurals: "The Cabinet is divided is better, because in the order of thought a whole must precede division; and The Cabinet are agreed is better, because it takes two or more to agree."

Plurals of numbers

The following rules apply to the plurals of numerical terms such as dozen, score, hundred, thousand, million, and similar:

Nouns used attributively

Nouns used attributively to qualify other nouns are generally in the singular, even though for example, a dog catcher catches more than one dog, and a department store has more than one department. This is true even for some binary nouns where the singular form is not found in isolation, such as a trouser mangle or the scissor kick. This is also true where the attribute noun is itself qualified with a number, such as a twenty-dollar bill, a ten-foot pole or a two-man tent. The plural is used for pluralia tantum nouns: a glasses case is for eyeglasses, while a glass case is made of glass ; also an arms race versus arm wrestling. The plural may be used to emphasise the plurality of the attribute, especially in British English but very rarely in American English: a careers advisor, a languages expert. The plural is also more common with irregular plurals for various attributions: women killers are women who kill, whereas woman killers are those who kill women.
The singular and plural forms of loanwords from other languages where countable nouns used attributively are, unlike English, plural and come at the end of the word are sometimes modified when entering English usage. For example, in Spanish, nouns composed of a verb and its plural object usually have the verb first and noun object last and the plural form of the object noun is retained in both the singular and plural forms of the compound. However, when entering English, the final s of chupacabras was treated as a plural of the compound rather than of the object of the verb, and so "chupacabra" without an s is the singular in English, even though in Spanish chupacabra could literally be construed as a creature that sucks only one single goat.

Teams and their members

In the names of sports teams, sometimes a noun will be given a regular plural in -s even though that noun in normal use has an irregular plural form. For example, there are teams called the Miami Marlins and the Toronto Maple Leafs, even though the word marlin normally has its plural identical to the singular and the plural of leaf is leaves. Some teams use a non-standard plural spelling in their names, such as the Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox.
When a sport team's name is plural, the corresponding singular is often used to denote a member of that team; for example a player for the Cincinnati Reds may be referred to as a Red. This also applies to the St. Louis Blues ice hockey team, even though it is named after the song the "St. Louis Blues" and thus blues was originally a singular identical to its plural.
When a team's name is plural in form but cannot be singularized by removing an -s, as in Boston Red Sox, the plural is sometimes used as a singular. Oftentimes, the singular "Red Sox" will be pronounced as if it were "Red Sock", even though the spelling suggests otherwise.
When a team's name is singular, as in Miami Heat and Colorado Avalanche, the same singular word may also sometimes be used to denote a player. When referring to more than one player, it is normal to use Heat players or Avalanche players.
For the treatment of teams as plural even if they have singular names, see above.

Adjectives as collective plurals

Certain adjectives can be used, uninflected, as plurals denoting people of the designated type. For example, unemployed and homeless can be used to mean "unemployed people" and "homeless people", as in There are two million unemployed. Such usage is common with the definite article, to denote people of a certain type generally: the unemployed, the homeless.
This is common with certain nationalities: the British, the Dutch, the English, the French, the Irish, the Spanish, the Welsh, and those where the adjective and noun singular and plural are identical anyway, including the Swiss and those in -ese. In the case of most nationalities, however, the plural of the demonym noun is used for this purpose: Americans, Poles. Cases where the adjective formation is possible, but the noun provides a commonly used alternative, include the Scottish, the Danish, the Finnish, the Swedish.
The noun is normally used anyway when referring to specific sets of people, although the adjective may be used especially in case of a group of mixed or unspecified sex, if the demonym nouns are gender-specific: there were five French in the bar.

Numerical quantities

In common parlance, plural simply means "more than one". A quantity of one may sometimes be grammatically inflected as plural.

Decimals are always plural

Any quantity that includes decimal precision is plural. This includes 1 followed by any number of zeros. It is normal to say 1.0 gallons per flush, for instance, 0.6 units, or 3.3 children per couple, not *1.0 gallon, *0.6 unit, or *3.3 child per couple.

Fractions

Fractions are themselves singular or plural depending on the numerator, and whatever they apply to can be singular or plural, depending on whether it refers to a fraction of a single item or many items.

Equivalent to zero is usually plural

Any zero quantity can be plural or singular, though plural is the default. So the following plurals are standard.
However, if it has already been established that one item was in question, one can use no to deny that such an item exists in the singular:
The interrogative pronouns who and what generally take singular agreement, e.g.
In some cases, a plural verb can be used when the answer is expected to be plural
When followed by a plural predicative complement, a plural verb must be used:
not
Following which, a singular verb suggests a singular answer, and a plural verb suggests a plural answer:
When asking How many?, plural is standard, even if the expected answer is only one.