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English plurals include the plural forms of English nouns and English determiners. This article discusses the variety of ways in which English plurals 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.
The "Dictionary of Old English" divides the definition of Old English: dweorg into either "a dwarf or pygmy" or "a fever"; however, it has been argued that the distinction between the two meanings may not have been prevalent among Germanic peoples in the Early Middle Ages, due to the close association between the beings and sickness in ...
The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary (2006) by Gilliver, Marshall, and Weiner has a section on Tolkien's usage of dwarves (pp. 104-108). This section is pretty clear: ""Before Tolkien, the standard plural of dwarf in modern English had strictly been dwarfs" (p. 104). As examined in this section, Tolkien's usage is ...
Irregularly, English nouns are marked as plural in other ways, often inheriting the plural morphology of older forms of English or the languages that they are borrowed from. Plural forms from Old English resulted from vowel mutation (e.g., foot/feet), adding –en (e.g., ox/oxen), or making no change at all (e.g., this sheep/those sheep).
from cor, "dwarf" + gi (soft mutation of ci), "dog". cwm (very specific geographic sense today) or coomb/combe (dated). Cornish; komm; passed into Old English where sometimes written 'cumb' flannel the Oxford English Dictionary says the etymology is "uncertain", but Welsh gwlanen = "flannel wool" is likely.
The Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE) is a single-volume English dictionary published by Oxford University Press, first published in 1998 as The New Oxford Dictionary of English (NODE). The word "new" was dropped from the title with the Second Edition in 2003. [ 1 ]
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first edition in 1884, traces the historical development of the English language, providing a comprehensive resource to ...
English also tends to use the plural with decimal fractions, even if less than one, as in 0.3 metres, 0.9 children. Common fractions less than one tend to be used with singular expressions: half (of) a loaf , two-thirds of a mile .