918: Uncommon Pluralizations Jun 14, 2017

As far as pluralization goes, English makes the process far easier than some other languages. Since there is no gender, the plural of a word only needs to have one form, and unlike in German where words are commonly pluralized with '-en', '-er', '-e', or by some internal-modification, even without any need for more differentiation, English tends to use just '-s'. There are a few regular exceptions to this. First, there are words that are pluralized by modifying the ending in a more complicated way that with merely a suffix, for example those ending in '-um' or '-on' that are pluralized by dropping that ending and adding an '-a' such as with 'flagellum' to 'flagella' or 'criterion' to 'criteria'. These, however, are all borrowed from from other languages and aren't very common; moreover, it could probably be understandable if someone said 'flagellums'. There are also a few historical methods of pluralizing that are not borrowed, such as adding '-en' to 'ox to make 'oxen', but also there are some nouns that are pluralized by internal modification, as with 'man' to 'men', but these are rare.