979: Pluralizing Irregular Compounds Aug 14, 2017

There are many words that people consider to be irregular for different reasons including how it is conjugated or pluralized, but whether or not that term is fitting for all of them, the so called irregulars can make speech tricky at times. 'Tooth' is held by many to be irregular because it changes internally, even though it pluralized to have an /i/ sound with 'teeth'; arguably this is not irregular and just less common, as the same process happens with other words like 'goose, geese', 'foot, feet', and 'mouse, mice', even if they have come to differ slightly over the years. Nevertheless, it may make things confusing when these words come at the end of compounds, such as 'sweet-tooth'. In general, the conventional way to tackle this problem is to pluralize (or however else modify) a word in the way it would be when on its own, such that 'sweet-tooth' becomes 'sweet-teeth', but it would not be impossible to hear 'sweet-tooths', because the -S is the most common way to pluralize words, including new words when they are added to English, and people tend towards trends with which they are familiar.