Irregular Plurals Quiz #2

Based on the plural, can you guess the singular forms of these words?

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Last updated: November 14, 2018

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First submitted	May 15, 2014
Times taken	61,669
Average score	57.1%
Rating	4.29

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Plural	Singular
Teeth	Tooth
Dice	Die
Alumni	Alumnus
Bacteria	Bacterium
Genera	Genus
People	Person
Criteria	Criterion

Plural	Singular
Data	Datum
Media	Medium
Foci	Focus
Paparazzi	Paparazzo
Phenomena	Phenomenon
Brethren	Brother
Lice	Louse

Plural	Singular
Hooves	Hoof
Salmon	Salmon
Dormice	Dormouse
Pence	Penny
Vertices	Vertex
Ova	Ovum
Viscera	Viscus

+23

Level 56

Jun 30, 2014

Long story short: In order to speak English, you have to speak Latin (and Old English).

Level 69

Jun 30, 2014

and its nothing compare to the speaking of French..

+16

Level 24

Jun 30, 2014

Pronounced as its written? The last letters of every word are just there for funzies

Level 83

Sep 30, 2015

But German is such a mouthful, whereas if you learn the rules for French you barely have to say anything, seeing as there are so many similar sounds and half the letters aren't voiced.

Level 22

Jan 15, 2016

Spanish is the easiest languages of all to pronounce. Think about this: we speak English and we have trouble spelling many words, while children in Spain learn to spell perfectly within a few years. There are rules for how things are pronounced in Spanish.

Level 82

Aug 29, 2016

Among European languages I think Spanish and Italian are the easiest in terms of pronunciation. I think Italian probably more so than Spanish from an English speaker's point of view, as Spanish has a few more tricky sounds (such as the rolled 'r' and regional variations such as yeísmo), but I think of all languages Japanese is probably the easiest I've encountered. Which is good, because it is nightmarishly complex in every other way.

Level 81

Oct 17, 2016

Agreed that Spanish is the easiest to pronounce and spell. Every letter in each word is pronounced. English, not so much. Latin, Greek, German, Old English, Middle English, and on and on.

Level 77

Oct 17, 2016

You guys haven't tried Finnish yet. One letter - one sound. Whatever letter you put next to it doesn't change the sound. The only exception is the combination ng (and nk). Spanish is much harder in comparison.

Level 73

Oct 18, 2016

What sillie said! If you listen to Finnish people who don't pronounce English that well, you'll notice they all speak it pretty much the same way. They are pretty much pronouncing the words as they appear written (also known as 'rally English', made famous by Finnish rally & F1 drivers). :) But yes, Finnish is super super easy to pronounce.

Level 70

Mar 3, 2018

Hungarian also has a simple letter to sound correspondence. Any Spanish or Italian word can be pronounced correctly once you know the rules but there are some irregularities - for instance sometimes there are silent h's and it is impossible to tell by how a word sounds whether this will be the case. Also the c sound changes, in Italian from k to ch, and in Spanish from k to th, whereas in Hungarian it is always ts.

Level 89

Oct 10, 2019

German is brutally out the window. Every word has its own plural, no standardization or rules. Every noun has 1 of 3 genders, again with no standard endings, just random. To complicate matters, of the dozen or so specific case and gender words for "the" they'll switch from one to the other with no apparent reason. For example "die" is single female plural and simple plural in nominative and accusative case, yet plural becomes "der" in the dative plural case. "Der" also being singular masculine in the nominative case. Some nouns take no plural form or a form which could be an entirely different singular noun, so better use your "the"s properly.

Pronouns follow a similar bizarre path of the same word jumping around from case, person and number. For example "sie" means she, they and you (formally). "Ihr" means her (possessive) and you plural (familiar with you).

Whose dumb idea was all this? So much for German ingenuity.

Level 45

Nov 19, 2023

What you are saying has little to no sense. German has a lot of standardized suffices that specifically belong to die, der or das (e.g. suffices -ung, -schaft, -heit, -keit are always linked to die). There are strict grammatical rules for changing die into der in Dativ, der into den in Akkusativ and so on. Germans almost always strictly abide by the grammatical rules, there are barely any exceptions. I am actually really confounded about your comment, because German is the opposite of what you described. You clearly have little experience with foreign languages, don't you? Because English gets bloody difficult with all its tenses, inconsistent pronunciation and peculiar exceptions for non-native speakers.

Level 82

Jun 30, 2014

a dash of Spanish, Arabic and a few others wouldn't hurt, either.

Level 57

Oct 17, 2016

And French too, and old Gaelic, Norse, Germanic (Saxon). English really is an amazing mishmash!

Level 84

Jun 9, 2017

Knowing semaphore helps too.

Level 62

Mar 8, 2018

And Frisian.

Level 45

Feb 27, 2021

I speak both Latin and Greek (which is useful for words like phenomenon or bacterium) but still I only got 12

+10

Level 67

Jun 30, 2014

The plural of person is persons. People is the singular for a collective group of persons that share a trait and made plural by peoples. Often times the only shared trait for people is humanity itself, but that does not make it a plural for person. Both person and people are made plural in a regular fashion.

Level 82

Jun 30, 2014

That's one way the words are used. However it's also correct to say, for example, "are you the only person there or are there two or three people?" The clue is not incorrect. Words in English are often used in more than one way.

Level 67

Jun 30, 2014

@kalbahamut I generally find your arguments very well thought out, but in this case I could not disagree more. It is not a matter of opinion or how the words are used in casual speech; it is a matter of definition. One would be hard-pressed to find a dictionary that lists the plural of person as people, or the corollary, that the singular of people is person. People and person are etymologically unrelated words, except that they both have Latin roots.

Level 22

Oct 17, 2016

@wolfcat95

kalbahamut is correct that both "people" and "persons" are suitable plurals for the word "person". Both terms are correct, but are used in different circumstances. "Persons" is to refer to the plural of "person", but can be easily defined with a particular number. However, "people" is used when accounting for more than 1 person, but is not easily countable.

Source: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/person?s=t

Level 82

Oct 18, 2016

Thank you, Chaos. That's what I was saying.

Level 62

Apr 22, 2020

So, "forest" is the plural of "tree"?

Level 82

May 12, 2020

No. Forest is the singular of forests. It's not related to the word tree.

Level 76

May 4, 2022

@wolfcat95 - "One would be hard-pressed to find a dictionary that lists the plural of person as people"

And yet, here it is in the Cambridge Dictionary, the Oxford University Press via Lexico, the Collins Dictionary, the Britannica Dictionary, Oxford Learner's Dictionaries, and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.

Level 42

Nov 19, 2023

@robnobody and here's Merriam-Webster, for good measure

Level 49

Jun 30, 2014

Was going to write the same thing.

Level 34

Jul 1, 2014

People is the plural for person, and you will find it listed as such in dictionaries. Terms such as "persons" and "peoples" have fairly distinct connotations/usages different to using people as the plural of person.

"There were thousands of people/persons at the concert." If you are a native speaker of English, which would you choose? People is clearly correct in this instance.

"There are a number of people/persons of interest in this case." Again which sounds correct to you? In this particular usage "persons" would win out.

Persons is not the usual plural form of person - it is only used in specific instances.

Level 82

Oct 10, 2019

Doesn't really matter what the plural of person is, though. What's the singular of people if not person? Peep?

Level 79

Jan 26, 2021

^ this

Level 75

Jun 30, 2014

Enjoyed this one. Another one, please?

+10

Level 47

Jun 30, 2014

Irregular plurals? Half of those weren't irregular but just regular Latin words

Level 83

Oct 17, 2016

I think the majority of them were regular plurals in other languages.

Level 57

Oct 17, 2016

But how many people in the world "regularly" speak Latin these days, besides in the Church or in some science fields? I'd say Latin words in general are QUITE irregular these days, haha. Vale!

Level 51

Oct 19, 2016

Exactly. Not irregular at all, just come from other languages.

Level 89

Oct 10, 2019

They're extremely irregular. People who will correct you for using a plural such as stadiums instead of stadia are more often than not not gratingly incorrect unless you are using it in the nominative case, in general. Latin and Greek plural suffixes ("suffices" in fake non-Latin plural ;) change widely depending on sentence pecking order, possession, declension class, motion and so on. So remembering and using these "correct" plurals is most often wrong and ignorant in a strictly technical sense.

Level 77

Jun 30, 2014

And here I thought the singular or plural of Paparazzi was scum or vermin. Oh well.

Level 71

Jul 3, 2014

Mitochondria/ mitochondrion would be great for this quiz.

Level 56

Nov 29, 2015

Nice little fishy trick question!!

Level 44

Dec 30, 2015

prout

Level 72

Apr 22, 2016

Media messed me up a bit. I was thinking about the media (Like TV, newspapers etc.) didn't realize they were talking about psychics until after I saw the answer

Level 67

Jul 30, 2019

They werent, and psychic didnt even cross my mind. Media is a collectively term, seperately each is a different medium, tv, radio, newspaper article.

Also in art the different materials you use are medium/media. Like in "media" they are carriers choosen to get your subject across. In this case the media is more tangible (maybe you heard of mixed media?)

instead of carrier you could also say channel. Maybe that makes the term "medium" a bit clearer for you, he/she is chosen to channel through, as the spokesperson or intermediate to convey a message.

intermediate hah!

Level 67

Jul 30, 2019

Btw the plural of the psychic medium is nót media, it is mediums.

Level 48

Oct 17, 2016

The vast majority of these irregular plurals are a result of words being introduced from other languages in which pluralization rules are being followed consistently. Other folks here have addressed the sea of Latin words. Usually in Italian - paparazzo - a word ending in 'o' becomes plural by changing it to 'i'. (Feminine words - ending in 'a' become 'e'.)

Level 84

Oct 17, 2016

For goodness sake. I got every single one -- even viscus -- but I looked at "foci" and I'm thinking, 'Foe-see. What the heck is fo-see?' Time runs out. Oh, "folk-eye"!

Level 49

Oct 18, 2016

Interesting. I've always called the second item by its plural name, when it was a singular item. I thought they were interchangeable terms. I learn this after 31 years. Other answers I couldn't get even though I know them.

Level 51

Nov 27, 2016

nice quiz

Level 88

Aug 6, 2018

In French you need to know the ‘gender’ of every single thing In existence before making any sense. (And there no rules like ... “all vehicles are she” for instance.)

Level 67

Jul 30, 2019

It is that way in most languages, feminine, masculine or neuter

Level 70

Oct 11, 2019

Indo-European languages, maybe. A lot of non-Indo-European languages don't bother with grammatical gender.

Level 79

Oct 10, 2019

Wow, managed to get all 21 in 47 seconds first try!

Level 68

Oct 10, 2019

Here I am thinking, 'wow, I didn't realize salmon had a singular form' 🤦

Level 91

Oct 10, 2019

All the way to the end and hadn’t a notion about viscera!

Level 66

Oct 11, 2019

I guessed, based on some of the other answers, and got lucky. I would't have had a clue otherwise.

Level 70

Feb 25, 2021

That was the only one I didn't know off hand. Fortunately 'genera' was in there and they follow the same rule.

Level 18

Feb 26, 2021

I never would have gotten viscera if I hadn't already answered genera...

Level 82

Feb 25, 2021

I'm too lazy and divested from the site now to do it. Can someone else make a part #3?

Level 68

Feb 25, 2021

Even better, make a randomized version

Level 63

Feb 25, 2021

I have to say "Salmon" feels like a bit of a trick question on this quiz considering all the others actually change. Is it really irregular if it stays the same? There are a lot of examples of that in the English language

Level 82

Feb 25, 2021

Yes it is irregular. If it were regular then the plural of salmon would be salmons.

Level 64

Feb 28, 2021

A lot of fish and cloven-hoofed mammals follow that pattern. But still definitely irregular.

Level 65

Feb 26, 2021

Interesting how we use criterium as a singular for criteria in Dutch, and have it also apply to the type of bike race, where in English a criterium solely refers to the bike race.

Level 45

Feb 27, 2021

only missed the last one

Level 64

Mar 1, 2021

Why is "dice" so hard? Everyone seems to know that it's an irregular plural; I don't think I've ever heard anyone use "dies" as the plural. But I've heard plenty of people use "dice" as both the singular and plural. Probably because "dice" is simply more common, like "bacteria." But I've also heard people use "die" as both the singular and plural. And these were board game enthusiasts who really should know better. I even have one board gamer friend who uses "dice" as the singular and "die" as the plural. Hypercorrection to the max.

Level 71

Jan 9, 2023

Realized I’ve been using the plurals of “brother” and “penny” wrong my whole life! 🤦‍♂️

Level 48

Nov 19, 2023

Pence is the plural for a sum of money. Pennies is the plural if meaning separate penny coins.

Level 68

Aug 21, 2023

21/21, 100%, first try. “Viscus” is easy if you know Latin.

Level 57

Nov 19, 2023

If I can use genera/genus, which i already knew, to guess viscera/viscus, which I didn't, then it's not really irregular, is it?

Level 72

Nov 19, 2023

Most of these are more loan words than irregular plurals. They're actually quite regular in the original language

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