yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

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


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

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.

More Articles

View All
overstimulation is ruining your life
Imagine being on a sinking ship, and instead of trying to save yourself, you’re scrolling through a never-ending feed of memes and gossips. That exactly reflects what’s happening in our lives; we are drowning in a sea of overstimulation and digital distra…
The Oldest Unsolved Problem in Math
This is a video about the oldest unsolved problem in math that dates back 2000 years. Some of the brightest mathematicians of all time have tried to crack it, but all of them failed. In the year 2000, the Italian mathematician Piergiorgio Odifreddi listed…
Humans Need Not Apply
Every human used to have to hunt or gather to survive. But humans are smart…ly lazy so we made tools to make our work easier. From sticks to plows, to tractors we’ve gone from everyone needing to make food to modern agriculture with almost no one needing …
Ample reserves regime | AP Macroeconomics | Khan Academy
What we’re going to do in this video is talk about some interesting things that have happened since 2008. In particular, we’re going to talk about what an ample reserves regime is but even more importantly what its actual implications are and how you can …
Easiest tips to be a successful Real Estate Agent
[Music] Starss [Music] STS. What’s up, YouTube? It’s Graham here. I’m going to make a video today of the easiest tips that you can do to be successful in real estate. We’re going to start with this. Do you know what this is? This is called a light switch…
Why I Don’t Feel Guilty for Busting Wildlife Traffickers | Nat Geo Live
(Onkuri speaks) Government agencies in many parts of the world either don’t know much about the problem of wildlife trafficking or they might be understaffed, they might be under-trained, they might be under-equipped. So, we go in to help them and supple…