Irregular plural nouns | -f to -ves | The parts of speech | Grammar | Khan Academy

Hello Garans! Today we're going to be talking about the irregular plural. Previously, I had said that if you take any English word, any noun, say the word "dog," and you tack an "S" onto the end of it, like so, boop, you get the word "dogs." That's how you form the plural.

Uh, in all cases, I was lying. Sorry! It turns out that English is a little bit more complicated than that. While adding an "S" to things is the way you usually make things plural, sometimes there are other changes, and sometimes you don't even pluralize using an "S" at the end. But we're not going to talk about that now. That's for another time.

What I want to talk about today is the most basic kind of irregular plural. So, we have the difference in English between regular and irregular plurals. Remember, a plural is when there's more than one of something. It comes from the Latin "plus," which means "more," as opposed to the singular, when there is just one of something. You know, one dog, two dogs.

So, there's a handful of words in English, and it really is a handful, that don't pluralize regularly. Words like "leaf" and "loaf" and "calf"—it's a baby cow. If you try to pluralize these as though they were regular plurals, you're going to return something that is not correct, or at least is not conventional within Modern Standard American English.

Right? So, "leafs," for example, unless you're talking about the Toronto hockey team, is not correct. In fact, the proper term, boop boop boop boop boop boop, is in fact "leaves." It is not "loaves," but "loaves"—tasty loaves of bread. It is not "calfs," but "calves."

So, there are several different kinds of irregular plurals. That's why this video is called part one, but I'm only going to cover one such irregular plural today, and that is the change from singular "F" to plural "V." An important caveat, an important exception here is double "F" words like "cliff" or "sheriff" or "sniff" do not change to "ve" or "V" in the plural. They become "cliffs," "sheriffs," "sniffs."

There are exceptions to that too, right? Like "staff" to "staves." But for the most part, double "F" doesn't change to "ve." Single "F" mostly does, right? That's the general rule: singular word ends in "F," the plural will be "v-s." "Leaf" to "leaves," "loaf" to "loaves," "calf" to "calves." Generally, for the most part, English, ah, so silly! Who's driving this thing? We love it, though. You can learn anything! Dave, out.