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For example, in Spanish, nouns composed of a verb and its plural object usually have the verb first and noun object last (e.g. the legendary monster chupacabras, literally "sucks-goats", or in a more natural English formation "goatsucker") and the plural form of the object noun is retained in both the singular and plural forms of the compound ...
Examples of plural forms are the French mangeons, mangez, mangent – respectively the first-, second- and third-person plural of the present tense of the verb manger. In English a distinction is made in the third person between forms such as eats (singular) and eat (plural).
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).
There are three plural forms of octopus: octopuses, octopi, and octopodes. A fourth form octopods is occasionally used by scientists for taxonomic purposes. [13] Currently, octopuses is the most common form in the UK as well as the US; octopodes is rare, and octopi is often objected to as incorrect. [14]
A plural base title can also redirect to an article (Bookends redirects to Bookend; Faces redirects to Face). If separate primary topics are determined, add a hatnote from the plural page to the singular form (or vice versa). Sometimes, what appears to be a plural form may also be a separate word, which can influence the primary topic decision.
In British English (BrE), collective nouns can take either singular (formal agreement) or plural (notional agreement) verb forms, according to whether the emphasis is on the body as a whole or on the individual members, respectively; compare a committee was appointed with the committee were unable to agree.
This guideline does clarify when plurals of the form "word(s)" should be used. An article can use a word's singular or plural form or both forms, hence the need for dual form "word(s)". For example, most video game articles often use the singular form "player" to refer all players, even though the games may be multiplayer, online or offline.
This template allows easy formatting of statements of the form "# thing(s)", with correct use of plurals. It uses the "plural" magic word , so it should work in other languages with minimal modification.