Updated 03032023-185913
The table below lists English words that have irregular plurals.
Not included are words that follow any of the following rules:
Source: Wikipedia article on English plurals, which you can see for much more information.
Some of words of foreign origin that have the endings above can form or always form their plurals regularly. The list above should therefore be considered as a guide only. See particular words to determine their plurals.
The following plurals exhibit umlaut, meaning that they are inflected by changing the vowel, as in man/men. These stem from the stem vowel being mutated due to a following /i/ contained in Germanic consonant stem plurals that later vanished.
Singular |
Plural |
Notes |
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The plural foot is used colloquially in the sense of the unit of distance |
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Also for the names of animals ending in -louse, such as woodlouse, which becomes woodlice |
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Also for nouns ending in -man in the sense of a particular type of man, such as postman or Frenchman; words ending in -man that have another origin are regular (eg, ataman becomes atamans; shaman becomes shamans) |
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Also applies to the names of other animals that end in -mouse, such as dormouse and titmouse, which become dormice and titmice respectively; the plural mouses is sometimes used for the computer peripheral |
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Also for nouns ending in -tooth, such as eyetooth, which becomes eyeteeth |
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Also for nouns ending in -woman in the sense of a particular type of woman, such as policewoman or Englishwoman |
The following plurals are relics of Old English weak noun inflection, where the plural was formed by suffixing -an/-ena/-um, depending on case, which yields the ending.
“oxen” is ox-en, while “children” is in fact a double plural: “cild-ru-en”, where -ru is a strong noun plural, and -en is a weak noun plural.
and are humorous computing slang formed by the same rule.
Singular |
Plural |
Notes |
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Also for nouns ending in -child in the sense of a particular type of child, such as schoolchild | ||
Also applies to the names of other animals that end in ox, such as musk-ox |
A suppletive plural is a plural whose root is different from the root of the singular, i.e., not from the same underlying word.
Singular |
Plural |
Notes |
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Also for nouns ending in -person, such as chairperson, which becomes chairpeople. In formal contexts, the plural is persons (and similarly for nouns ending in -person); people is also a singular noun in the sense of a community of people |
“pence” is a contraction of “pennies”, collective plural of “penny”.
Singular |
Plural |
Notes |
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in the sense of a numbered cube used in games. |
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Also for multiples of a penny, such as sixpence. Pence, a British usage, is used only the sense of an amount of money; in the sense of a number of coins worth a penny each, the plural is pennies |