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You have undoubtedly heard platypuses more often. I have never seen nor heard anyone write or say “platypi” before now. Some web sleuthing suggests that platyp
by jacobolus 5y ago
You 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.