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plural

/ˈplʊəɹəl/
nounB1+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #8,453 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: plurals

The plural is the form of a word used for more than one. The plural of child, a plural noun, in the plural.

English mostly adds s, but the irregular ones are the commonest words — children, feet, mice, teeth — because frequent words resist change. Some nouns have no plural at all, and some, like scissors, have no singular.

Definitions of plural

  1. 1nounpluralThe form of a word used for more than one.B1+

    “Our teacher asked us to write the plural of each noun on the list.”

plural is a grammatical form.

Where it comes from

Latin pluralis, of more than one, comes from plus, more. The -s plural is not from Latin but from an Old English ending that spread until it swallowed nearly all the others.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *pleh₁-

  2. Latin

    plūrālis — of or belonging to more than one, belonging to many

  3. Old French

    plurel — plural

  4. Middle English

    plurelle

  5. English, today

    plural

Built from

  • plūris · Latin — more

From Middle English plurelle, from Old French plurel (“plural”), Latin plūrālis (“of or belonging to more than one, belonging to many”), from plūs, plūris (“more”) + -ālis.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

plural in the wild

  • English and many other languages present number categories of singular or plural.

    Grammatical number

  • The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter or sound.

    The

  • The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the default quantity represented by that noun.

    Plural

  • An example of a plural is the English word boys, which corresponds to the singular boy.

    Plural

  • In other verses it takes plural agreement and refers to gods in the plural.

    Elohim

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.