5 ms·

The plural of radius is radiuses, and the plural of Prius is Priuses. I am so tired of comments where people make up ‘funny’ pseudo-Latinate plurals.

Semiapies 17y ago
"Radiuses" is a real, but less-common and less-accepted plural for radius. A quick search and check of references will confirm that. "1 - 10 of about 92,000 for radiuses." "Results 1 - 10 of about 5,700,000 for radii [definition]."
EricBurnett 17y ago
According to every dictionary I can find[1], radii is at least as accepted as radiuses. As for Prius, since it is a made up word the plural is essentially whatever the accepted English usage turns out to be. According to Toyota[2] anything customers want to use is fine, however online the general consensus seems to be that Prius is the plural form as well. I am so tired of comments where people assert their particular view as true without doing any research, especially when trying to correct someone else. [1] See http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Radius http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Radius, for examples. [2] From http://www.greenhybrid.com/wiki/index.php/Interview_with_Ed_LaRocque http://www.greenhybrid.com/wiki/index.php/Interview_with_Ed_... , an interview with a manager at Toyota.
- codyrobbins 17y ago
  You shouldn’t assume I don’t know what I’m talking about just because I didn’t take the time to include references in my comment. I have a graduate degree in linguistics and one of my concentrations is word formation. While it’s true that radii is definitely a plural form of radius, it’s not really the generally accepted plural anymore. (At least, not where I live in America, and at least in spoken language. I’m not sure about Britain.) Neither are indices, data, corpora, etc. Highly technical people like hackers and engineers continue to use the fossilized plurals, because these forms are part of the prestige dialect that indicates to other people that you have been educated and can remember to use non-standard plurals. But normal people do not use these forms—they simply use the standard English pluralization rules because there is no reason not to. The poster who mentioned the relative density of each term in Google’s indexes (sorry, couldn’t resist) would have to somehow normalize the numbers to account for the fact that technical people are disproportionately more likely to be using these nouns in the first place, and so a simple tally doesn’t show the real picture if we’re talking about how the language is used ‘in general’. I don’t have the book with me so I can’t find the exact reference, but if you’re truly interested there is an entire chapter in ‘An Introduction to Modern English Word Formation’ by Valerie Adams that talks about how these plural forms arose in English. They were basically made up by scientists and philosophers during the Middle Ages who felt that any English word with a Latinate or Greek root should use the corresponding root language’s plural form, because Latin and Greek were more ‘pure’ languages. (No doubt this attitude contributed to the fact that they continued writing in Latin in general for a thousand years after Rome was no more.) These forms became fossilized in English because the people using them were educated and therefore part of what was considered a prestigious class. That is, using them makes you sound smart, and that’s why they’ve persisted. By my own judgment, though, they certainly sound more out of place to normal English speakers today than the corresponding standard English plural. (I last read this book six years ago, so this summary is from memory—the details may be slightly different but I’m pretty certain that is the general gist of it.) The reason this irks me in general is because we speak English, not Latin. Unless you speak Latin you probably don’t know how to correctly form Latin plurals, which follow a relatively complicated scheme depending on the class of noun, its grammatical case, person, and number. See http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000814.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000814.h... for a discussion. Japanese doesn’t have a plural form—does that mean we should say in English things like, ‘Hiroki is holding three kimono in his arms’? The only reason it sounds remotely acceptable is because you interpret kimono as a mass noun that doesn’t have a plural form (like rice), but physically speaking kimonos aren’t like rice in that they are actually countable. The sentence ‘Hiroki is holding three kimonos in his arms’ sounds much better. Modern English has a very simple pluralization rule. There are three allophones of the plural morpheme: the unvoiced allophone –s is suffixed to words ending with an unvoiced phoneme (t, p, k, f, etc.); the voiced allophone –z is added to words ending with a voiced phoneme (d, b, g, m, all vowels, etc.); and the allophone –əz is added to words ending with a phoneme that is similar in articulation features to s and z (s, z, sh, ch, j, etc.). There are exceptions to this rule that show extreme resistance to degradation (such as children and teeth), but in general the exceptions are slowly being replaced by the standard plural in normal speech. If someone said ‘Look at all those oxes over there,’ most people wouldn’t blink an eye. Finally, I wasn’t trying to correct the OP. My point was simply that the jokes where you make up a funny non-standard plural are lame. As mentioned in the excerpt from the Jargon File that someone posted above, hackers (and railroad enthusiasts, among others) have been making these same jokes for decades. A variation over and over again for fifty years of the same old joke about a funny fake plural—enough already, ya know? Of course I’m aware that everyone’s sense of humor is different, so I can’t tell someone something isn’t funny because it’s a subjective assessment. So I’m just pointing out that these jokes aren’t funny to me, because the people making them might not realize how overplayed and unfunny they are to a lot of people. And please don’t get me started on made-up fanciful names for groups of animals… EDIT: See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_plural#Irregular_plurals_from_Latin_and_Greek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_plural#Irregular_plural... for more discussion.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
    - Semiapies 17y ago
      Please. There's no need for pointless dialect chauvinism; "radii" is the accepted and more common plural in American English as well as the UK version.
  - carussell 17y ago
    For what it's worth, as an American—living in the South, even—with English as my first language, I have literally never heard the word "radiuses" used (outside, perhaps, some musings about the plural of the word "radius"). Although my initial reaction was also "look, someone's making another lame Latin plural joke," I quickly saw that it wasn't as inapplicable most other occurrences.
  - Semiapies 17y ago
    "Neither are indices, data, corpora" Seriously? Just a quick Google suggests otherwise: 36,900,000 for indices vs 29,200,000 for indexes 1,440,000,000 for data vs 11,900,000 for datums (Heck, many people aren't familiar with "datum" to begin with...) 7,710,000 for corpora vs 239,000 for corpuses Linguistics student or not, do you have anything more than "people you talk to use these unusual forms" to base all this on?
    - codyrobbins 17y ago
      I just went to great length explaining what my claims are based on. Do you have anything to say other than an exclamation of incredulity? I already explained that an anecdotal comparison of Google hits wouldn’t be very meaningful. I just asked four non-engineer, non-technical, non-mathemetician friends the following fill-in-the-blank question: ‘The radius of a circle is the distance from the center to the edge. If there are two circles, there are correspondingly two ______.’ Three said radiuses. One said radii, however they pronounced it ‘ray-di-eye’. I asked a similar question with corpus and all four said corpuses. There is also probably at least some effect due to age here. I'm in my late twenties and my social circle is as well. If you're twenty years older than me, where your language is is twenty years behind mine. And sorry, data was a stupid example, it doesn't really have anything to do with what I was talking about. Data is already the plural form and I banged it out because nobody really uses datum as the singular. But data seems like a mass noun since the way it’s typically used you don’t really have a single ‘data’. We use a counter, as in piece of data in the same way we say grain of rice.
sp332 17y ago
Further, note the prevalence of certain kinds of nonstandard plural forms. Some of these go back quite a ways; the TMRC Dictionary includes an entry which implies that the plural of `mouse' is meeces, and notes that the defined plural of `caboose' is `cabeese'. This latter has apparently been standard (or at least a standard joke) among railfans (railroad enthusiasts) for many years On a similarly Anglo-Saxon note, almost anything ending in `x' may form plurals in `-xen' (see VAXen and boxen in the main text). Even words ending in phonetic /k/ alone are sometimes treated this way; e.g., `soxen' for a bunch of socks. Other funny plurals are the Hebrew-style `frobbotzim' for the plural of `frobbozz' (see frobnitz) and `Unices' and `Twenices' (rather than `Unixes' and `Twenexes'; see Unix, TWENEX in main text). But note that `Twenexen' was never used, and `Unixen' was not sighted in the wild until the year 2000, thirty years after it might logically have come into use; it has been suggested that this is because `-ix' and `-ex' are Latin singular endings that attract a Latinate plural. Among Perl hackers it is reported that `comma' and `semicolon' pluralize as `commata' and `semicola' respectively. Finally, it has been suggested to general approval that the plural of `mongoose' ought to be `polygoose'. The pattern here, as with other hackish grammatical quirks, is generalization of an inflectional rule that in English is either an import or a fossil (such as the Hebrew plural ending `-im', or the Anglo-Saxon plural suffix `-en') to cases where it isn't normally considered to apply. This is not `poor grammar', as hackers are generally quite well aware of what they are doing when they distort the language. It is grammatical creativity, a form of playfulness. It is done not to impress but to amuse, and never at the expense of clarity. - Jargon File
axod 17y ago
From a couple of searches. "The radius of a circle is the distance from the centre of the circle to its edge. The radius of a regular polygon is the distance from the centre of the polygon to any one of its vertices. The plural of radius is radii." From maths.org, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY. http://thesaurus.maths.org/mmkb/entry.html?action=entryByConcept&id=18 http://thesaurus.maths.org/mmkb/entry.html?action=entryByCon... From the BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/tutors/lessonplans/spelling/rtf/plurals_wsheet.rtf http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/tutors/lessonplans/spelling/... From the Oxford dictionary, http://www.askoxford.com:80/concise_oed/radii?view=uk http://www.askoxford.com:80/concise_oed/radii?view=uk From the Chambers dictionary, http://www.chambersharrap.co.uk/chambers/features/chref/chref.py/main?query=radii&title=21st http://www.chambersharrap.co.uk/chambers/features/chref/chre... I'm sure both are generally accepted. Geniuses, Genii, Radiuses, Radii. Bear in mind I'm talking about English, not American-English which may be different. I'm certainly not just making this stuff up though ;)

Semiapies 17y ago

"Radiuses" is a real, but less-common and less-accepted plural for radius. A quick search and check of references will confirm that. "1 - 10 of about 92,000 for radiuses." "Results 1 - 10 of about 5,700,000 for radii [definition]."

EricBurnett 17y ago

According to every dictionary I can find[1], radii is at least as accepted as radiuses. As for Prius, since it is a made up word the plural is essentially whatever the accepted English usage turns out to be. According to Toyota[2] anything customers want to use is fine, however online the general consensus seems to be that Prius is the plural form as well. I am so tired of comments where people assert their particular view as true without doing any research, especially when trying to correct someone else. [1] See http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Radius http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Radius, for examples. [2] From http://www.greenhybrid.com/wiki/index.php/Interview_with_Ed_LaRocque http://www.greenhybrid.com/wiki/index.php/Interview_with_Ed_... , an interview with a manager at Toyota.

codyrobbins 17y ago
You shouldn’t assume I don’t know what I’m talking about just because I didn’t take the time to include references in my comment. I have a graduate degree in linguistics and one of my concentrations is word formation. While it’s true that radii is definitely a plural form of radius, it’s not really the generally accepted plural anymore. (At least, not where I live in America, and at least in spoken language. I’m not sure about Britain.) Neither are indices, data, corpora, etc. Highly technical people like hackers and engineers continue to use the fossilized plurals, because these forms are part of the prestige dialect that indicates to other people that you have been educated and can remember to use non-standard plurals. But normal people do not use these forms—they simply use the standard English pluralization rules because there is no reason not to. The poster who mentioned the relative density of each term in Google’s indexes (sorry, couldn’t resist) would have to somehow normalize the numbers to account for the fact that technical people are disproportionately more likely to be using these nouns in the first place, and so a simple tally doesn’t show the real picture if we’re talking about how the language is used ‘in general’. I don’t have the book with me so I can’t find the exact reference, but if you’re truly interested there is an entire chapter in ‘An Introduction to Modern English Word Formation’ by Valerie Adams that talks about how these plural forms arose in English. They were basically made up by scientists and philosophers during the Middle Ages who felt that any English word with a Latinate or Greek root should use the corresponding root language’s plural form, because Latin and Greek were more ‘pure’ languages. (No doubt this attitude contributed to the fact that they continued writing in Latin in general for a thousand years after Rome was no more.) These forms became fossilized in English because the people using them were educated and therefore part of what was considered a prestigious class. That is, using them makes you sound smart, and that’s why they’ve persisted. By my own judgment, though, they certainly sound more out of place to normal English speakers today than the corresponding standard English plural. (I last read this book six years ago, so this summary is from memory—the details may be slightly different but I’m pretty certain that is the general gist of it.) The reason this irks me in general is because we speak English, not Latin. Unless you speak Latin you probably don’t know how to correctly form Latin plurals, which follow a relatively complicated scheme depending on the class of noun, its grammatical case, person, and number. See http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000814.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000814.h... for a discussion. Japanese doesn’t have a plural form—does that mean we should say in English things like, ‘Hiroki is holding three kimono in his arms’? The only reason it sounds remotely acceptable is because you interpret kimono as a mass noun that doesn’t have a plural form (like rice), but physically speaking kimonos aren’t like rice in that they are actually countable. The sentence ‘Hiroki is holding three kimonos in his arms’ sounds much better. Modern English has a very simple pluralization rule. There are three allophones of the plural morpheme: the unvoiced allophone –s is suffixed to words ending with an unvoiced phoneme (t, p, k, f, etc.); the voiced allophone –z is added to words ending with a voiced phoneme (d, b, g, m, all vowels, etc.); and the allophone –əz is added to words ending with a phoneme that is similar in articulation features to s and z (s, z, sh, ch, j, etc.). There are exceptions to this rule that show extreme resistance to degradation (such as children and teeth), but in general the exceptions are slowly being replaced by the standard plural in normal speech. If someone said ‘Look at all those oxes over there,’ most people wouldn’t blink an eye. Finally, I wasn’t trying to correct the OP. My point was simply that the jokes where you make up a funny non-standard plural are lame. As mentioned in the excerpt from the Jargon File that someone posted above, hackers (and railroad enthusiasts, among others) have been making these same jokes for decades. A variation over and over again for fifty years of the same old joke about a funny fake plural—enough already, ya know? Of course I’m aware that everyone’s sense of humor is different, so I can’t tell someone something isn’t funny because it’s a subjective assessment. So I’m just pointing out that these jokes aren’t funny to me, because the people making them might not realize how overplayed and unfunny they are to a lot of people. And please don’t get me started on made-up fanciful names for groups of animals… EDIT: See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_plural#Irregular_plurals_from_Latin_and_Greek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_plural#Irregular_plural... for more discussion.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
  - Semiapies 17y ago
    Please. There's no need for pointless dialect chauvinism; "radii" is the accepted and more common plural in American English as well as the UK version.
- carussell 17y ago
  For what it's worth, as an American—living in the South, even—with English as my first language, I have literally never heard the word "radiuses" used (outside, perhaps, some musings about the plural of the word "radius"). Although my initial reaction was also "look, someone's making another lame Latin plural joke," I quickly saw that it wasn't as inapplicable most other occurrences.
- Semiapies 17y ago
  "Neither are indices, data, corpora" Seriously? Just a quick Google suggests otherwise: 36,900,000 for indices vs 29,200,000 for indexes 1,440,000,000 for data vs 11,900,000 for datums (Heck, many people aren't familiar with "datum" to begin with...) 7,710,000 for corpora vs 239,000 for corpuses Linguistics student or not, do you have anything more than "people you talk to use these unusual forms" to base all this on?
  - codyrobbins 17y ago
    I just went to great length explaining what my claims are based on. Do you have anything to say other than an exclamation of incredulity? I already explained that an anecdotal comparison of Google hits wouldn’t be very meaningful. I just asked four non-engineer, non-technical, non-mathemetician friends the following fill-in-the-blank question: ‘The radius of a circle is the distance from the center to the edge. If there are two circles, there are correspondingly two ______.’ Three said radiuses. One said radii, however they pronounced it ‘ray-di-eye’. I asked a similar question with corpus and all four said corpuses. There is also probably at least some effect due to age here. I'm in my late twenties and my social circle is as well. If you're twenty years older than me, where your language is is twenty years behind mine. And sorry, data was a stupid example, it doesn't really have anything to do with what I was talking about. Data is already the plural form and I banged it out because nobody really uses datum as the singular. But data seems like a mass noun since the way it’s typically used you don’t really have a single ‘data’. We use a counter, as in piece of data in the same way we say grain of rice.

sp332 17y ago

Further, note the prevalence of certain kinds of nonstandard plural forms. Some of these go back quite a ways; the TMRC Dictionary includes an entry which implies that the plural of `mouse' is meeces, and notes that the defined plural of `caboose' is `cabeese'. This latter has apparently been standard (or at least a standard joke) among railfans (railroad enthusiasts) for many years On a similarly Anglo-Saxon note, almost anything ending in `x' may form plurals in `-xen' (see VAXen and boxen in the main text). Even words ending in phonetic /k/ alone are sometimes treated this way; e.g., `soxen' for a bunch of socks. Other funny plurals are the Hebrew-style `frobbotzim' for the plural of `frobbozz' (see frobnitz) and `Unices' and `Twenices' (rather than `Unixes' and `Twenexes'; see Unix, TWENEX in main text). But note that `Twenexen' was never used, and `Unixen' was not sighted in the wild until the year 2000, thirty years after it might logically have come into use; it has been suggested that this is because `-ix' and `-ex' are Latin singular endings that attract a Latinate plural. Among Perl hackers it is reported that `comma' and `semicolon' pluralize as `commata' and `semicola' respectively. Finally, it has been suggested to general approval that the plural of `mongoose' ought to be `polygoose'. The pattern here, as with other hackish grammatical quirks, is generalization of an inflectional rule that in English is either an import or a fossil (such as the Hebrew plural ending `-im', or the Anglo-Saxon plural suffix `-en') to cases where it isn't normally considered to apply. This is not `poor grammar', as hackers are generally quite well aware of what they are doing when they distort the language. It is grammatical creativity, a form of playfulness. It is done not to impress but to amuse, and never at the expense of clarity. - Jargon File

axod 17y ago

From a couple of searches. "The radius of a circle is the distance from the centre of the circle to its edge. The radius of a regular polygon is the distance from the centre of the polygon to any one of its vertices. The plural of radius is radii." From maths.org, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY. http://thesaurus.maths.org/mmkb/entry.html?action=entryByConcept&id=18 http://thesaurus.maths.org/mmkb/entry.html?action=entryByCon... From the BBC, http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/tutors/lessonplans/spelling/rtf/plurals_wsheet.rtf http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/tutors/lessonplans/spelling/... From the Oxford dictionary, http://www.askoxford.com:80/concise_oed/radii?view=uk http://www.askoxford.com:80/concise_oed/radii?view=uk From the Chambers dictionary, http://www.chambersharrap.co.uk/chambers/features/chref/chref.py/main?query=radii&title=21st http://www.chambersharrap.co.uk/chambers/features/chref/chre... I'm sure both are generally accepted. Geniuses, Genii, Radiuses, Radii. Bear in mind I'm talking about English, not American-English which may be different. I'm certainly not just making this stuff up though ;)