The Hoolet Lecture: irregular plurals

irregular plurals
irregular plurals

It’s bad enough when you have a single dwarf taking a knife to your loaf, but what about when there’s more than one?

Making something plural is not always a case of bunging an “s” after it.

Some of these are common and you’ll have no problem. The plural of man being men, or foot being feet.

See also:

  • mouse, mice
  • goose, geese
  • tooth, teeth

Slightly more troublesome is when an “f” becomes a “v” – so leaf becomes leaves, or half becomes halves:

  • knife, knives
  • wife, wives
  • elf, elves
  • loaf, loaves
  • life, lives

Or maybe they stay the same:

  • sheep
  • fish
  • deer
  • aircraft
  • series

We like to have some sort of helpful advice in #TheHooletLectures of how to remember, or patterns to watch for but no, this time it is just the English language at its best. The only way to learn many of these tricky critters is to commit them to memory.

Sorry.

Delivered to you as part of #TheHooletLectures – regular helpful pointers that we try not to let descend into a general rant. But we don’t make any promises.

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