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 (or minus one)", and plural means "not singular". In other words, plural means not just "more than one" but also "less than one (except minus one)". This less-than aspect can be seen in cases like the temperature is zero degrees (not *zero degree) and 0.5 children per woman (not *0.5 child 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 (in some transcription systems, this is abbreviated as ). 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 (a voiceless sibilant). 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 (a voiced sibilant) 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 (detailed below) 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 (pronounced ):
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 (that is, used as a vowel) preceded by a consonant usually drop the y and add -ies (pronounced , or in words where the y is pronounced ):
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 (particularly names of people) of this type usually form their plurals by simply adding -s:English Irregular Plural Nouns UNIT S4: YS OR IES? 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.Book titles include Mary Fulbrook, The Two Germanies. 1945–1990 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996); Henry Ashby Turner, The two Germanies since 1945 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1987). Nor does the rule apply to words that are merely capitalized common nouns: P&O Ferries (from ferry).
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 (rarely used) 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 (including all words where is represented orthographically by gh or ph) 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 (zero inflection). Many of these are the names of animals: bison buffalo (or buffaloes) carp cod deer (and all species in the deer family such as moose and elk) fish (or fishes) kakapo (and similar loanwords – see below) neat pike salmon sheep shrimp or shrimps (British) 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".Partridge, Eric, Usage and Abusage: A Guide to Good English, revised by Janet Whitcut (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997), pp. 238–39. Similarly, nearly all kinds of fish have no separate plural form (though there are exceptions—such as rays, sharks or lampreys). 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:
craft (meaning 'vessel'), including aircraft, watercraft, spacecraft, hovercraft (but in the sense of a skill or art, the plural is regular, crafts) blues (referring to individual songs in the blues musical style: "play me a blues"; "he sang three blues and a calypso") cannon (cannons is more common in North America and Australia, while cannon as plural is more common in the United Kingdom.) chassis (only the spelling is identical; the singular is pronounced while the plural is ) counsel (in the meaning of lawyer) head (referring, in the plural, to animals in a herd: "fifty head of cattle": cf brace above) iris (usually irises, but iris can be the plural for multiple plants; in medical contexts irides is used, see below) series, species (and other words in -ies, from the Latin fifth declension) [The word specie refers only to money, coins, from the Latin ablative singular form in the phrase in specie. It has no plural form.] stone—as a unit of weight equal to 14 pounds (occasionally stones)
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 (e.g. "five Dutchmen", "several Irishmen"), and uncountable plurals used to refer to entire nationalities collectively (e.g. "the Dutch", "the Irish").
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 (eggs), lamber/lambren (lambs), and calver/calveren (calves).
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 -(e)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 (these are sometimes called mutated plurals):
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 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 (suppletive; also regular persons, in more formal (legal and technical) contexts; people can also be a singular noun with plural peoples.) die—dice (dice is the standard plural for gaming dice, where it is often also used as the singular, and a variant plural for integrated circuit dies; in other senses, dies is used.) penny—pence (as a fraction of a pound unit of currency. The coin, worth one penny or one cent, has plural pennies. Similarly for halfpenny. Decimalisation in 1968–1971 promoted use of "p" for "new 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 (some with sub-categories). Usually, in borrowing words from Latin, the endings of the nominative are used: nouns whose nominative singular ends in -a (first declension) have plurals in -ae (anima, animae); nouns whose nominative singular ends in -um (second declension neuter) have plurals in -a (stadium, stadia; datum, data). (For a full treatment, see Latin declensions.)
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 (the Athenian Greek of Plato, Aristotle, and other great writers), not Demotic Greek, Koine (Biblical) 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 (usually Latin). Other nouns have become Anglicised, taking on the normal "s" ending. In some cases, both forms are still competing.