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The plural may be used to emphasise the plurality of the attribute, especially in British English but very rarely in American English: a careers advisor, a languages expert. The plural is also more common with irregular plurals for various attributions: women killers are women who kill, whereas woman killers are those who kill women.
The irregular form tends to indicate duration, whereas the regular form often describes a short-term action (The fire burned for weeks. vs. He burnt his finger. ), and in American English, the regular form is associated with the literal sense of a verb, while the irregular form with a figurative one.
The plural form of a noun is usually created by adding the suffix-(e)s. The pronouns have irregular plurals, as in "I" versus "we", because they are ancient and frequently used words going back to when English had a well developed system of declension. English verbs distinguish singular from plural number in the third person present tense ("He ...
Irregular verbs in Modern English include many of the most common verbs: the dozen most frequently used English verbs are all irregular. New verbs (including loans from other languages, and nouns employed as verbs) usually follow the regular inflection, unless they are compound formations from an existing irregular verb (such as housesit , from ...
In BrE, both irregular and regular forms are current, but for some words (such as smelt and leapt) there is a strong tendency towards the irregular forms, especially by users of Received Pronunciation. [citation needed] For other words (such as dreamed, leaned, and learned [1]: 165, 316 ) the regular forms are somewhat more common.
In linguistics, a broken plural (or internal plural) is an irregular plural form of a noun or adjective found in the Semitic languages and other Afroasiatic languages such as the Berber languages. Broken plurals are formed by changing the pattern of consonants and vowels inside the singular form.
In English, the most common formation of plural nouns is by adding an -s suffix to the singular noun. (For details and different cases, see English plurals.) Just like in English, noun plurals in French, Spanish, and Portuguese are also typically formed by adding an -s suffix to the lemma form, sometimes combining it with an additional vowel ...
With irregular plurals whose usage far exceeds the usage of the singular, the common and unastonishing plural titles Bacteria, Algae, and Data are preferred over Bacterium, Alga, and Datum (although some would argue that data is a mass noun and, as such, is already singular).