Booher's Rules of Business Grammar - Dianna Booher 2009

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Misspelled and misused words

SPELLING RULES FOR PLURAL FORMS

Making nouns plural creates other spelling hazards. (You knew things couldn’t be that simple, right?) Let’s go from easy to more difficult here with the rules:

Regular nouns: Add an —s.

Irregular nouns: Memorize these. (You’ve probably learned these intuitively as different words. Their spellings may change internally or may not change at all from the singular to the plural form.)

Nouns ending in —s, —ss, —z, —sh, —ch, and —x: Add —es.

Nouns ending in —f or —fe: Add —s to some. For others, change —f to —v and add —es.

Nouns ending in —y preceded by a consonant: Change —y to —i and add —es.

Nouns ending in —y preceded by a vowel: Add —s.

Nouns ending in —o: Add —s or —es. (But: all musical and literary terms ending in —o add —s to form their plurals.)

Compound words written as two words or hyphenated: Make the primary word plural. If there is no primary word, add —s to the end of the compound.

Foreign words: Some words retain the plural from their original language. With others, their plurals now conform to English rules.

But:

Memory tip

Latch onto a few examples and extrapolate the rules. Or, check a good online dictionary.