MEPX
Chapter 10 of 13All chapters
  1. 1Parts of speech
  2. 2Sentences and fragments
  3. 3Subject and verb agreement
  4. 4Tenses
  5. 5Lie and lay
  6. 6Pronouns
  7. 7Apostrophes
  8. 8Sound alike pairs
  9. 9Fewer and less
  10. 10Plurals
  11. 11Commas
  12. 12Other punctuation
  13. 13Active and passive

Chapter 10 of 13

Plurals

Regular, irregular and borrowed.

Patterns

Most nouns add -s or -es. Words ending in a consonant plus y change to -ies, and some words ending in f change to -ves: knife becomes knives.

  • Words ending in -sis take -ses: analysis becomes analyses, crisis becomes crises.
  • Some keep older forms: child and children, mouse and mice, foot and feet.

Borrowed words

Latin and Greek plurals survive in technical writing: criterion and criteria, phenomenon and phenomena. Data is a plural in strict usage and a mass noun in ordinary use, and both are defensible.