Peculiar Plurals

Not all plurals are predictable

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The Cholmondeley sisters and their swaddled babies by an unknown artist c. 1610 (public domain - Wikipedia)

The inimitable Tom Lehrer passed away on July 26, 2025 at the age of 97.

Lehrer had a profound impact on a few generations of people, due to his creative use of the language in song, first in his albums and tours and then in the songs he wrote specifically for the children’s television program Electric Company (including “Silent E,” “L-Y,” and others).¹

In his spoken introduction for “Fight Fiercely, Harvard” (an alternative fight song for his alma mater), Lehrer made a clever plural out of a Latin singular:

“The days of my undergraduacy long ago when there used to be these very long Saturday afternoons in the fall with nothing to do — the library was closed — just waiting around for the cocktail parties to begin. And on occasions like that, some of us used to wander over to the... I believe it was called the stadium, to see if anything might be going on over there. And one did come to realize the football fight songs that one hears in comparable stadia have a tendency to be somewhat uncouth, and even violent, and that it would be refreshing, to say the least, to find one that was a bit more genteel.”

While stadia is an acceptable pluralization of stadium, it isn’t something we’re used to reading or hearing.

And in a language where the plural of deer is deer, the plural of moose is moose, and the plural of goose is geese, you never know what to expect.

What other unusual plurals are worth exploring? Let’s dive in.

Beeves

The plural of beef is beeves, but only when referring to cattle (as opposed to petty arguments). Makes sense, when you consider that hooves is the plural of hoof.