Why We Have Awkward Plurals

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/ESL students the world over. Even native English speakers can sometimes stumble to understand the confusing mess that has become our reality with the language. 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 days of Old English, the fifth to twelfth centuries CE. Influenced by the Germanic Anglo-Saxons, the people of Britain adopted many Proto-Germanic language conventions, such as adding -n to create plurals. Examples of these are eyen (eyes), housen (houses), shoen (shoes), and oxan (plural of ox, later to be oxen).

During the twelfth to sixteenth centuries, the Middle English period, the -an plural gave way to -en, so at this time, oxan became oxen. (This is a very simplified version of history since the Old English singular form oxa changed to the Middle English singular oxe, but the spirit of the point about the change in plurals is accurate enough.) While this was happening, several existing irregular plurals from Old English such as brethre and childer mutated into brethren and children as back-formations; the former changed into brothers by end of the sixteenth century, but brethren stuck around for a time and is still sometimes used today in formal circumstances, mostly revolving around religion; however, it is largely considered archaic. Children and oxen are the only -en formations left in common modern 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—linguistically, and technically biologically as well.

More German 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. This vowel change comes from the shift in pronunciation made by adding an umlaut to a vowel in German to create a plural. Even if the vowel shift has historical roots, the relationship can still be seen today with the German noun Mann /ˈman/ and Männer /ˈmenər/ (Agelo 2009, 39). Quite simply, men and women kept the Germanic-influenced plural forms.

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 is related to why so many nouns—fish, sheep, elk, and salmon—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 fisc (fish) as a singular remained fisc (fish) as a plural.

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, “Barnyard creatures take the -s (fowls, ducks, pigs, and so forth)…. But one shoots (wild) fowl and duck…” (Agelo 161). 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 increasingly 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 imprudent not to mention that both meese or 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 as the first or last letter of a word, it would be pronounced as we would do today. However, when the f appeared in the middle of a word between two vowels as well as when it appeared after a pronounced consonant and followed by a vowel, then 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 (Studiopedia n.d.; Sutherland 2020).

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 (Agelo 256). When these words entered English, speakers took on the French convention of tacking on -s at the end of the word (Sutherland; 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 rooves was quite fashionable in the late sixteenth century (https://bit.ly/3PJ2HDr), 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 (https://bit.ly/3RPzs3G). Now, here is where things get a bit odd to say the least. Hoofs has historically been more popular (https://bit.ly/3cGLcVT) than hooves (https://bit.ly/3PXaIVx), even if it didn’t last as the plural form. Roofs and hoofs and rooves and hooves have swapped back and forth over time, and today, we have roofs and hooves for no seemingly 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 gently into that goodnight just yet; a follow-up article about Latin and Greek plurals is coming soon—octopuses, octopodes, and octopi, oh my!

References

Agelo, John. 2010. The Origins and Development of the English Language. 6th ed. Boston: Wadsworth.

Bosworth, Joseph. 2014. “Cicen.” An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online, edited by Thomas Northcote Toller, Christ Sean, and Ondřej Tichy. Prague: Faculty of Arts, Charles University. https://bosworthtoller.com/6114.

Crystal, David. 2019. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Crystal, David. 2008. A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. 6th ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Hoad, T. F., ed. 1996. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hogg, Richard. 2002. An Introduction to Old English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Ltd.

Moessner, Lilo. 1989. Early Modern English Syntax. Tubingen: Niemeyer.

Smith, Jeremy J. 2009. Old English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Studiopedia. n.d. “Old English Phonetics, Lecture 7. Linguistic Features of Old English.” Accessed July 19, 2022. https://studopedia.su/10_121612_Old-English-Phonetics.html.

Sutherland, Kyle. 2020. Excel at ESL. “Why is the Plural of Chief not Chieves? – Hidden History of English.” Accessed July 20, 2022. https://excelatesl.com/why-is-the-plural-of-chief-not-chieves/.

Videen, Hana. 2022. The Wordhord: Daily Life in Old English. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. s.v. “Anglo-Norman Language.” Accessed July 22, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Norman_language#Language_of_administration_and_justice.