Irregular plural nouns – the MUTANT PLURALS

hello grammarians welcome to irregular plurals part for the mutant plurals ooh yes friends these words have mutant superpowers in that they can transform weirdly and obnoxiously not obeying any other rules of English pluralization but here's the cool thing there are only seven words that behave this way what way I'll explain by writing all of them down the words are foot woman man tooth goose Mouse louse looks pretty straightforward right the thing about these words is that none of them take s as a plural so the plural of foot is not foots the plural of woman is not woman's the plural of tooth is not tooths the reason these are called mutant plurals is because the vowel sound the ooh or the or the or the or the or the or the au turns into a different sound it turns into a different vowel sound so the plural of foot is not foots but feet the plural of woman is not woman's but women the plural of man is not man's but men the plural of tooth is not tooths but teeth the plural of goose is not gooses but geese the plural of mouse is not Mouse's but mice and the plural of louse is not louses but lice you can see that Mouse and louse actually change their n spelling as well to from se to see even though it's the same sound louse lice for whatever reason just from some quirk of our spelling history not only do we change the vowels used here we also change the consonants you say why is this the case I'm so glad you asked I'm going to save that for another video in the meantime just these seven words one two three four five six seven are the only words in English that behave this way so you're in luck this is a handful of words to memorize and provided you're not borrowing anyone else's hats ideally you won't have to worry about lice very often that's my hope you can learn anything Dave it out