Then there are the occasional neuter third declension nouns ending in -us that have carried their own elaborate plurals into English: corpus/ corpora, genus/ genera, onus/ onera, opus/ opera. Among the commoner examples, we have: apparatuses, censuses, consensuses, foetuses, hiatuses, impetuses, linctuses, nexuses, plexuses, prospectuses, sinuses and statuses. In English, nouns derived from the fourth declension take the conventional plural form. Some were masculine fourth declension nouns, for instance, which signalled their plural form simply by lengthening the “u” in -us-the spelling remained the same. One reason for this is that not all Latin nouns ending in -us were second declension. But there are some -us nouns in English that never take -i in the plural, except by mistake. You can still say nautili if you want to, of course. There has been declining discussion of the hippopotamus in the Google corpus over the last century, but we can see that the regular plural hippopotamuses started to edge out the traditional hippopotami at some time during the 1980s.Īnd the two plurals of nautilus fought a brief tussle in the 1960s, but nautiluses is now the clear winner: Here’s the Ngram for hippopotamus and the two versions of its plural, for instance: *įor -us words that do take -i, there’s been a creeping trend towards regularization. So viri has never been an appropriate plural. And in the singular it seems to have behaved as a second declension neuter noun, for which plural forms were rare and irregular. Virus/ viruses is something of a special case, since virus (“poison”) was a non-countable noun in Classical Latin (like “music” in English) so it had no plural form. Other second declension nouns in the same category are callus/ calluses, campus/ campuses, chorus/ choruses, circus/ circuses, genius/ geniuses and lotus/ lotuses. Pretty much everyone is saying crocuses, while croci has always languished. Here’s the Google Ngram for crocus and its two plural forms, for instance: My three examples above are still in fairly standard use, but not all English -us words that are derived from the Latin second declension customarily take -i in the plural. What these words have in common is that they derive from Latin second declension masculine nouns. Writing about the noun form of bogus recently made me think about nouns ending in -us, and how some of them have irregular plurals derived from their Latin origins: alumnus and alumni cactus and cacti stimulus and stimuli-and so on. Fowler, A Dictionary Of Modern English Usage (1926)
Most Latin words in -us have plural in -i, but not all, & so zeal not according to knowledge issues in such oddities as hiati, octopi, omnibi & ignorami …
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