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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)".
Structured Word Inquiry (SWI) is a pedagogical technique that involves the scientific investigation of the spelling of words. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] SWI emphasizes the scientific exploration of word structure through morphology , [ 4 ] [ 5 ] etymology , related words, and phonology .
See English plural § Singulars with collective meaning treated as plural. English nouns are not marked for case as they are in some languages, but they have possessive forms, through the addition of -'s (as in John's , children's ) or just an apostrophe (with no change in pronunciation) in the case of -[e]s plurals ( the dogs' owners ) and ...
morphological alteration (e.g. number change as in people as a plural word instead of a singular word) tautological compounds (e.g. peacock for original pea, which already meant 'peacock') wordplay/puns; stress alteration (e.g. stress shift in E. ímport vs. impórt) graphic alteration (e.g. E. discrete vs. discreet) phraseologism
The Latin word vīrus was a neuter noun of the second declension, but neuter second declension nouns ending in -us (rather than -um) are rare enough that inferring rules is difficult. (One rare attested plural, pelage as a plural of pelagus, is borrowed from Greek, so does not give guidance for virus.)
The collective presents similar issues as the distributive in its potential classification as grammatical number, including the fact that some languages allow both collective and plural markers on the same words. Adding a collective to a plural word does not change the number of referents, only how those referents are conceptualized. [315]
Plurals and verb forms almost always follow even though not listed here: "analyses/analyzes", "analysed/analyzed" etc. (but note "analysis" is universal). Some usages identified as American English are common in British English; e.g., disk for disc. A few listed words are more different words than different spellings: "aeroplane/airplane", "mum ...
The spelling indicates the insertion of /ᵻ/ before the /z/ in the spelling - es , but does not indicate the devoiced /s/ distinctly from the unaffected /z/ in the spelling - s . The abstract representation of words as indicated by the orthography can be considered advantageous since it makes etymological relationships more apparent to English ...