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I'm always at a loss. "indices is generally preferred in mathematical, financial, and technical contexts, while indexes is relatively common in general usage"
by fancy_pantser 11y ago
I'm always at a loss.
"indices is generally preferred in mathematical, financial, and technical contexts, while indexes is relatively common in general usage"
- fmela 11y agoI think of "indices" as the plural of index and "indexes" as a present verb meaning to index (e.g. the "the background process indexes the tables").
- thaumasiotes 11y agoThis isn't hard to explain -- most people producing "general usage" don't know Latin and nearly never refer to even a singular index.
- duaneb 11y agoDifferent languages have different plurals. Both are accepted because of the history of using latin suffixes (i.e. indices) and because it is the correct way to pluralize regular noun (i.e. indexes). This is the same reason "iris" has three accepted plurals: iris (genitive, from common use and genus name), irises (english plural), and irides (latin plural).
- thaumasiotes 11y agoSomething's gone wrong here. If iris is the genitive, no plural form can be irides. (Also, I tend to think of iris as being from Greek, although apparently the English word does come from a Latin borrowing.)
- duaneb 11y agoYes, sorry, you're correct, I had the nominative and genitive cases swapped when I checked the dictionary.