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
How I make SIX FIGURES from posting Real Estate listings on Craigslist
What’s up you guys, it’s Graham here. So, some of you may already know, I pretty much built my entire real estate business by posting leases on Craigslist. From that, I’ve been able to make over six figures per year consistently from clients that I’ve ori…
Equivalent expressions with negative numbers | 7th grade | Khan Academy
Or ask which of the following expressions are equivalent to 2 minus 9.4 plus 0 plus 3.71, and we need to pick two answers. So pause this video and see if you can have a go at it before we do this together. All right, now let’s look through the choices. S…
6.5 Ways To Invest $10,000 ASAP
What’s up Grandma? It’s guys here. So I recently found out that the African-American household has nearly ten thousand dollars saved in their bank account, and that gave me an idea: we should go over the six and a half best ways that you could invest ten …
Analyzing concavity (algebraic) | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
So I have the function G here; it’s expressed as a fourth degree polynomial. I want to think about the intervals over which G is either concave upwards or concave downwards. Let’s just remind ourselves what these things look like. Concave upwards is an i…
My Response To Paying Higher Taxes | Joe Biden Tax Explained
What’s up, grandma’s guys? Here. So normally I don’t make videos like this, and I try to stay away from topics that might get taken out of context or politicized. But lately, it seems like there’s been non-stop talk, fear, and disagreements about the plan…
Charlie Munger Warns of High Inflation Consequences
We’ve done something pretty extreme and we don’t know how bad the troubles will be, whether we’re going to be like Japan or something a lot worse. I think we do know we’re flirting with serious trouble. Just yesterday, the Daily Journal Corporation held …