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Australian here; I’ve never heard anyone say ‘platypi’. It’s always ‘platypuses’. On the other hand, the plural of ‘octopus’ can be either ‘octopuses’ or ‘octop
by bradrn 5y ago
Australian here; I’ve never heard anyone say ‘platypi’. It’s always ‘platypuses’. On the other hand, the plural of ‘octopus’ can be either ‘octopuses’ or ‘octopi’.
- richardw 5y agoI’ve long wanted it to be octopi but my iPhone and most sources say no. Out of the dictionaries, only Oxford English seems to include but says based on a misunderstanding. Some detail on history here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus under pluralisation Interestingly: > Historically, the first plural to commonly appear in English language sources, in the early 19th century, is the latinate form "octopi" That’s quite late and interesting the “wrong” one was first.
- Arnavion 5y agoNow that you mention it, I'm not sure if I've heard platypi or platypuses more.
- jacobolus 5y agoYou have undoubtedly heard platypuses more often. I have never seen nor heard anyone write or say “platypi” before now. Some web sleuthing suggests that platypuses is somewhere between 20 and 100 times more common in English.
- Arnavion 5y agoYour web sleuthing has an American bias. I'm from an English-speaking country but I'm not American.
- jacobolus 5y agoAre you from the 1830s? https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=platypi%2C+platypuses&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cplatypi%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cplatypuses%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=platypi%2C+pla... Platypuses don’t live in North America. Most of the older sources that Google n-gram is pulling from for the above chart are British or Australian. A substantial proportion of the recent uses of platypi are grammar guides telling people that it should always be spelled platypuses.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y agoTasmanian here. It’s only platypuses if you see more than one at a time, and that’s pretty much never gonna happen ;)
- bradrn 5y agoAlas, I live in Sydney and have never even seen one in the wild. Hopefully someday I’ll get the opportunity to go where they live.