This post first appeared on LinkedIn in 2022 and has been lightly edited for this site.
Lions and tigers and bears, oh my—this is easy to understand. But what about wolves and mice and geese, and why is it moose not meese? Awkward plurals in English are the bane of EFL and ESL students the world over. Even native English speakers can sometimes struggle to understand the confusing mess our language has become. Today, let’s figure out why we say the things we do when making plurals.
Old Days and Middle Days
Language changes over time, but some habits and rules of the past have clung on and still pepper the oddly mish-mashed language we call English. While it is generally accepted that one adds an -s or -es to make plural forms, it is not always the case. Yes, if we have more than one pen, we have pens, and if we have more than one peach, we have peaches. That is easy enough, but then we have children and oxen. Why do we do this?
This is where we take a trip back to the old days of English, the fifth to twelfth centuries CE. Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxons settled in Britain and brought their own dialects with them, and those dialects became what we now call Old English. One of the conventions they brought with them was a whole class of nouns that made plurals with -an, so oxa became oxan, ēage became ēagan (eyes), and nama became naman (names).
During the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, the Middle English period, the -an plural gave way to -en, so oxan became oxen. The ending even spread to words that never had it, producing forms like housen and shoen. (This is a simplified version of history since the Old English singular oxa became the Middle English oxe, but the point about the change in plurals holds.) While this was happening, several existing irregular plurals from Early Middle English such as brethre and childer picked up a second plural ending to become brethren and children. Brother settled into brothers by the end of the sixteenth century, but brethren stuck around and still turns up in formal contexts, mostly religious, though it is largely archaic now. Children and oxen are the only -en formations left in common use, even if childs and oxes would have done well enough.
So, having gone through that explanation, it should be possible to conclude that chicken is the plural of chick; however, that would be wrong. Chicken actually originates from the Old English word cicen, with cicenu as the plural (Bosworth 2014). Over time, this changed to chiken before evolving into the modern chicken. If anything, it works the other way around, since chick is actually the later word, a shortening of chicken.
More Germanic Influence
So with the -n plural being sorted, we need to address words like man that change into men as a plural. The plurals are made by using a vowel mutation called the i-mutation or umlaut. These mutations include shifting a to e. For example, mann was a form of the Old English word for man with the plural menn, which is obviously men today. English didn’t get this from German, though. Both languages inherited the same plural endings from a common Germanic ancestor, and even if the vowel shift itself happened separately in each language after they had gone their own ways, the relationship can still be seen today with the German noun Mann /ˈman/ and Männer /ˈmɛnɐ/ (Algeo 2010, 39, 95). Quite simply, men kept the Germanic plural form, and so did women by extension, since woman is built on man.
Without harping on too much about this Germanic influence, it is important to also note that several other seemingly awkward plurals like feet, teeth, geese, and mice are also related to the same vowel mutation. For example, the German word for foot is Fuß, and the plural form is Füße, showing the familiar umlaut. The Old English word fōt (foot) followed the vowel-shift plural to become fēt (feet). The curious part is that the phonetically similar word bōc (book), which had bēc as a plural, didn’t retain beek as a plural form in Modern English (Smith 2009, 100).
All the Same
So, we know that the umlaut or i-mutation is why we have geese as a plural of goose, but why isn’t meese the plural of moose?
The reason why so many nouns—fish, sheep, deer, and swine—stay the same for the plural requires us to look at Old English once again. Old English, unlike today’s English, had three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter, which again is similar to modern German. The plural form of neuter nouns often didn’t change form to make a plural, so scēap (sheep) as a singular remained scēap (sheep) as a plural. Fish is a bit of an odd one, though. Its Old English ancestor fisc was actually masculine, with fiscas as the plural, but somewhere along the way it drifted in with the rest of them anyway.
In modern usage, there is sometimes a mix of using inflected and uninflected plural forms, such as with fish and fishes. (I wrote about this a while back.) But aside from instances like that, Algeo (2010, 161) notes that barnyard creatures take the -s—fowls, ducks, pigs, and so forth—but the wild versions of those same animals often don’t, so one shoots fowl and duck. While many of the examples in this section are animals, not all neuter nouns were animals. Folk and kind were both also neuter, and today, they occasionally retain their uninflected plural form, but it is becoming more common to add -s to these.
Moose is different. It was brought into English from Algonquian in the seventeenth century (Hoad 1996, 300). For reasons unknown, people adopted the Old English approach of using uninflected plurals despite the word having no relationship to Old English. This usage stuck, and this is why we have moose as a plural instead of meese or mooses. However, it would be remiss not to mention that both meese and mooses did appear from time to time over the past several hundred years, but moose became the predominant form, and we call it “correct” today.
V for Plurals
Making a plural form by swapping an f for a v is quite natural for native speakers, so much so that they do the swap with words that don’t need it—roofs is the preferred plural, not rooves. I’ll get back to that in a minute.
So, what is going on with wolves, knives, and wives? It is linked to pronunciation. In Old English, when f appeared at the beginning or end of a word, it would be pronounced as we would do today. However, when the f appeared between voiced sounds—between two vowels, for example—the sound would change to /v/. With that in mind, we can see how the Old English wulf and its plural wulfas would differ in pronunciation with the latter taking on the /v/ sound. Over time, the spelling changed to v (Algeo 2010, 89).
That is all well and good for the f-to-v shift, but then chief and chef are not made plural with chieves and cheves. The reason is that those words and several other related words are loanwords from French. Chief entered English from French in the fourteenth century, and chef in the nineteenth (Algeo 2010, 256). When these words entered English, speakers took on the French convention of tacking on -s at the end (Wikipedia 2022).
Well, that explains a lot, except for the problem with roof. If hoof becomes hooves, then by extension, roof should become rooves, but that isn’t the case. And to be quite frank, I cannot find any information on why. However, I can say that Google Books Ngram Viewer shows rooves was quite fashionable in the late sixteenth century, but that is about it as far as being a dominant form. Roofs, while having a couple of odd spikes in usage early in the sixteenth century, went out of favor for some time before becoming the standard in modern times. Now, here is where things get a bit odd to say the least. Hoofs has historically been more popular than hooves, even if it didn’t last as the plural form. (A caveat here: Ngram data that far back is working with a thin pile of books and a lot of shaky character recognition, so don’t put too much weight on the early centuries.) Roofs and hoofs and rooves and hooves have swapped back and forth over time, and today, we have roofs and hooves for no apparent reason. English will be English, for better or for worse.
Conclusion
Despite conspiracy theories, there is no cabal working to make English more difficult than it should be. History and blending linguistic conventions have brought us to where we are today. It is important to note that several other unusual plurals are scattered throughout English, and they all have their own stories. My post is a very simplified examination, and many nuances and sources have been omitted; for example, I’ve made no references to Old Norse and other languages that have greatly influenced English. However, I won’t let the topic go gentle into that good night just yet; a follow-up article about Latin and Greek plurals is coming soon—octopuses, octopodes, and octopi, oh my!
References
Algeo, John. 2010. The Origins and Development of the English Language. 6th ed. Boston: Wadsworth.
Bosworth, Joseph. 2014. “Cicen.” In An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online, edited by Thomas Northcote Toller, Sean Christ, and Ondřej Tichý. Prague: Faculty of Arts, Charles University. https://bosworthtoller.com/6114.
Hoad, T. F., ed. 1996. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, Jeremy J. 2009. Old English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wikipedia. 2022. “Anglo-Norman Language.” Accessed July 22, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Norman_language#Language_of_administration_and_justice.