Top Pages A-Z glossary punctuation A-Z confused words common mistakes ordered by seriousness Top Tip Get a grammar checker for your browser vocabulary for learners tests and games awkward plurals sayings and proverbs tattoo fails our Twitter page our YouTube channel. Plural of Syllabus Our Story Search The Quick Answer The plural of syllabus is syllabi or syllabuses.
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Did you spot a typo? Save Word. Definition of syllabus. Alex Jung, Vulture , 12 Oct. First Known Use of syllabus circa , in the meaning defined at sense 1. History and Etymology for syllabus Late Latin, alteration of Latin sillybus label for a book, from Greek sillybos. Learn More About syllabus.
Time Traveler for syllabus The first known use of syllabus was circa See more words from the same year. From the Editors at Merriam-Webster. It's a Trick Question Multiple spellings for "multiple" words. Style: MLA. English Language Learners Definition of syllabus. Get Word of the Day daily email! You do not need to know anything about any other language to use English well a principle I believe I first encountered from Languagehat, ages ago , so Latin can have no bearing on the question of how to pluralize the English words octopus and cactus and syllabus.
If we observe -i in substantial use by average people who are not trying to be playful when doing so, this must be treated as a fact about English morphology. As for the rule that sanctions it, the singular must be spelled -us and this syllable must be unstressed, but there is no requirement that the previous syllable also be unstressed, or else "cacti" would never work — instead, it's one of the few words that strongly prefer -i.
Not to me, but as has already been pointed out, the preference for "syllabi" appears to be leftpondian. I'd say syllabuses, omnibuses, prospectuses, radiuses…. Once upon a time, when I was working for AOL, I had a hard time persuading my boss that the plural of virus wasn't virii or viri. I enjoyed "taxen" if that's what it is : nice chime.
It's an odd legacy left to us by the literati of bygone days, this desire to use Latin and Greek inflections in English. We have a perfectly good language, with a straight forward enough way of making plurals — one simply adds a z, doesn't one? Aaron Toivo: …how to pluralize the English words octopus and cactus and syllabus. I mostly agree: certainly I'm happy to accept the historically-wrong octopi as 'correct' in modern English from a descriptive point of view: it is what people say, and I understand it, so it seems pointless to argue about it.
However, it is also the case that some people — presumably those who, as you say, "do not know enough about Latin morphology" to get it right — feel a need to inflict unhistorical and in some cases non-existent, from the point of view of Latin pseudo-Latin-ish endings on innocent words in what appears to be a non-playful way.
Every time I put my students through an online exam with a particular piece of software, I have to click through to a screen entitled "Assessment Statii". It's possible, I suppose, that this was intended as a joke; but I've always read it just as pretentiousness on the part of someone who felt "statuses" to be insufficiently classy. As one who has endured many education policy conferences, I would say that the plural of syllabus is tedium.
Re octopus, the 'correct' etymological plural would be 'octopodes', but anyone who says that deserves to be strangled eight times. I was recently discussing number in latinate words and foreign loan-words with a bunch of friends yes it was a terrific party , and several of them claimed to use the terms 'fora', 'amaretti' and even 'pizze' in normal conversation.
One of them claimed 'graffito' was natural to her. I was sceptical, but maybe they really do say these things. I would use 'fungi' and maybe 'cacti' and a few others, but to do it generally as a matter of principle seems really pretentious. Or am I just being a reverse peevist? English of course has many ways of pluralising words, of which -us to -i is merely one. The English rules for selecting which is correct are, um, not trivial no-one ever codified them for me as a child, I merely had to learn by rote which was proper.
Many people play with using the 'wrong' pluralisation for comic effect, or simply because they like the sound of the resulting word better. You might dislike but would you misunderstand virii, mongeese, boxen, sheeps, spice … some of these words are even in common use in some sub-cultures.
In the subsubsubfield of computer science I used to study, the term "reducible expression" is abbreviated to "redex". I do not think I have ever seen it pluralized as anything but "redices". I once had a professor, in lecture, tell the class that this was how it was pluralized.
Similarly, with varying degrees of seriousness, I have heard this pattern applied to other CS abbrieviations: "regices" for regular expressions and "mutices" for mutual exclusion locks. I might be wrong, but I think that's a slightly different thing Matthew. In your case you have people coming from a mathematical background dealing with neologisms, rather than existing words with commonly used, non-latinate plurals.
I reckon your professors are working albeit playfully by analogy with familiar words like 'matrix' and 'index'. That kind of analogical formation could even end up becoming productive in English. Language play is absolutely a legitimate source of new language, yes. But there's a difference between play, which is always deliberate, and language as you would use it without being conscious of it.
Only when something enters the latter category can we truly say it part of the language. Don't forget unices and linices! My personal favorite language play with this one is "defenestratrices".
I've waited for ten years now for an excuse to use it. D Nakassis: When I was in grad school one of my fellow students spent a few weeks looking into the origin of "syllabus," reaching the conclusion that the likeliest etymon was sillybos, sillybotos. He didn't publish his findings, unfortunately, or I would link to them. Though to this day when I hear "syllabi" I suppress an impulse to mock-correct it with "sillybotes. It may not be as silly for us to use Latinate plurals in English today as it was for Alcuin, Bede, and other medieval types to break with classical practice and decline Greek words in Latin texts.
But I still object to it. Latinists may chuckle the first time they see a form like "syllabi" or "Kleenices," but will soon weary of the humor; and in other ears they are simply oddities. Pflaumbaum: Your parties sound a lot like the ones I go to, but in any case, 'amaretti' sounds perfectly natural to me, at least if we are talking about the little cookies.
Would you say 'amarettos' instead? One usually encounters amaretti in a group, in fact, usually in a package with the word 'amaretti' on the front, so maybe this is why 'amaretti' sounds better to me than 'amaretto', unless of course, we are speaking of the liqueur, in which case 'amarettos' seems acceptable. The thing that really bothers me is when people say 'panini' to refer to a single sandwich. I'm not sure how this became so common in America…nobody says 'gelati' to refer to a single ice cream.
Maybe it has to do with store signs — a sandwich shop would advertise that it sells panini, but a gelateria would advertise gelato. Doesn't explain 'zucchini' for 'zucchina' though…. Years ago I worked on a revue which included a sketch in which a pretentious character talked about going to musea.
I sometimes use that one just to make myself laugh. Pflaumbaum and zoetrope , 'amaretti' sounds completely natural to me, maybe because of the ubiquity of 'biscotti'? And I love the sound of 'octopodes'; also 'rhinocerotes'. They do sound a little pretentious, but it would be great if they'd catch on and lose their pretentiousness.
I believe that neither the height nor the death is obligatory. I mean the Prague guys got up and walked away or at least limped , so you may not have to wait for a too demanding event to use defenestratrices. Then, in other news, there is the possibly universal use of the regular plural 'antipodes'—presumably because most of us have two feet. I wonder if Long John Silver uses antipous?
Sorry yes I meant the liqueur, not the biscuits. To me going to the bar and saying, "Can I have two Amaretti" would be similar to saying "I'd like to order some pizze". Yeah 'panini' also came up that night. But I'm sounding a bit like the people who objected to Sotomayor's use of 'Latina'… I should live and let live.
You say panino, I say panini, James says octopodes… but where does he put the stress? Latin u-stems in English usually take -uses: fetuses, viruses I think. Though nurses seem to refer to decubiti.
I say syllabi, though I had a department head once who used to write, "Please turn in your syllabii. Those Prague guys landed no doubt by Our Lady's grace in a huge pile of horseshit. Insert obvious remark here.
My experience as an anatomist has put me firmly in the -s or -es plurals camp; reviewed anatomical papers usually require all latin anaotmical terms to be properly declined i.
So in strict terms, it might be argued that there is no such thing as a latin or greek 'plural', but a plural declension. It doesn't seem to me to make any logical sense then to use the 'original' nominative plural when the noun is used in, say, an accusative sense. Okay, so who says English has to be logical; but it's how I make my personal choices. Is virus a u-stem, Roger? Lewis and Short gives it as neuter 2nd declension forming its genitive in -i…. Yeah, but I think 'graffiti' is usually used to refer to a whole bunch of them as opposed to one single graffito, maybe similar to 'etchings' or something like that in English.
I also find 'graffito' weird — it would be like talking about one spaghetto. A sandwich, on the other hand, is a clear singular entity, so the '-i' ending just sounds wrong — asking for a panini sounds about as bad as asking for a sandwiches!
It's a fine line between ostentation and respect for a foreign language I suppose… With Latin, the situation seems different, as most people don't really speak it in their daily lives. I think the determination should be the language one is speaking? If it is Latin, then the plural should comply with the grammatical form in Latin. However, if one is speaking English using a loan word and often not recognized as such or accurately identified to the language of origin , then English plurals should be perfectly acceptable.
In any event, to be super correct, we should insist on PIE forms if the word was borrowed from an Indo-European source. Pflaumbaum: Thanks, so it is. Being a neuter o-stem in -us leaves its plural rather a mystery, and I can't find a cite on short notice.
No wonder the English is viruses. If that isn't the singular of 'graffiti', what is? I think that in practice the answer is probably 'piece of graffiti', but having 'graffito' to hand would be useful. Regarding 'bi' as plural of 'bus', there is the poem by A. Hard to prove a negative but I can't off-hand think of an example of a Latinish-sounding word or new coinage ending in -a which has been pluralized, even jocosely, in -ae where that was not the actual Latin perhaps Late Latin plural.
Oh, and on the Italianate words, "spaghetti" and "graffiti" in English are probably best understood as mass nouns rather than count nouns, typically agreeing with singular verbs. Look near the bottom of their overgeneralization page. Re graffiti, I'm not sure it is a mass noun. I've heard 'a graffiti' and read 'a graffito' though I've never heard the latter outside discussions like this one.
Andrew: well, I think for a lot of people 'graffiti' is the singular, but I agree that 'graffito' or 'a piece of graffiti' or 'some graffiti' even to talk about one are all fine. But is 'graffitis' all right as a plural? If it follows the 'panini' pattern in English then it should be, but graffiti seems a bit more mass-nouny than panini, so I'm not sure.
There's a lot of discussion here of an eggcorn-like phenomenon that I think of as "classicfication" — treating words that sound like Latin or occasionally Greek as if they were. I think of "stewardi" "corrected" to -dae and "monokini" — well, perhaps we had more classical educations four decades ago. I seem to associate "a graffito" with archeologists, who after all introduced the term into English.
George — Regarding the "language one is speaking" approach: Reminds me of my all-to-brief semester in Germany in the mid 90s. Spent a lot of time in Italian restaurants with German eaters, and thus picked up a German plural of 'pizza.
I say 'a' plural form because embedded in the geeky student crowd, I wouldn't have known whether it was an in-joke like 'Kleenices' or a standard form. Since even the Greeks sometimes got confused and treated it as second declension, I think we can safely let that bit of pedantry molder in the obscurity it deserves.
Pflaumbaum Yep, '- e n' is one of several regular plural forms in German. Had the noun 'Pizza' arisen first in German, it would very likely pluralize to 'Pizzen.
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