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Concept
English plurals
Summary
English nouns are inflected for grammatical number, meaning that, if they are of the countable type, they generally have different forms for singular and plural. This article discusses the variety of ways in which English plural nouns are formed from the corresponding singular forms, as well as various issues concerning the usage of singulars and plurals in English. For plurals of pronouns, see English personal pronouns.
Phonological transcriptions provided in this article are for Received Pronunciation and General American. For more information, see English phonology.
Although the everyday meaning of plural is "more than one", the grammatical term has a slightly different technical meaning. In the English system of grammatical number, singular means "one (or minus one)", and plural means "not singular". In other words, plural means not just "more than one" but also "less than one (except minus one)". This less-than aspect can be seen in cases like the temperature is zero degrees (not *zero degree) and 0.5 children per woman (not *0.5 child per woman).
The plural morpheme in English is a sibilant suffixed to the end of most nouns. Regular English plurals fall into three classes, depending upon the sound that ends the singular form:
In English, there are six sibilant consonants, namely s z ʃ ʒ tʃ dʒ. Where a singular noun ends in a sibilant sound, the plural is formed by adding /ɪz/ or /əz/ (in some transcription systems, this is abbreviated as /ᵻz/). The spelling adds -es, or -s if the singular already ends in -e:
In most English varieties, there are five non-sibilant voiceless consonants that occur at the end of words, namely /p t k f θ/; some varieties also have /x/. When the singular form ends in a voiceless consonant other than a sibilant, the plural is normally formed by adding /s/ (a voiceless sibilant). The spelling adds -s:
Some that end in /f/ or /θ/, however, are "near-regular". See section below.
For a singular noun ending on a non-sibilant voiced consonant, the plural adds /z/ (a voiced sibilant) and the spelling adds -s:
In English, all vowels are voiced.
Official source
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