In our posts on how you can improve your vocabulary, we’ve talked about the importance of expanding your vocabulary to include descriptive adjectives so that your conversations will be colorful and your presentations piquant. Adjectives, however, don’t stand alone. The purpose of an adjective is to modify, or describe, a noun. For example, the adjective blue can be used to modify the noun sky (the blue sky). An adjective can also modify another adjective (the cerulean blue sky).

Unlike adjectives, which are frequently open to interpretation and nuance – if you say something is tall, do you mean taller than me, or over six meters, or something else? – nouns are fixed, concrete terms, or names (the word comes from the Latin word nomen, or “name”) for specific things. Part of improving and expanding your vocabulary comes down to the simple task of learning and memorizing these names.

This memorization of names is something that everyone does when they’re learning a language. Whether you’re a young child learning the words cat and book and ice cream, or a university physics student learning the varieties of subatomic particles (which include quarks and leptons and bosons, in case you’re wondering), you are, as we all are, engaged in a process of identifying things and learning what to call them. Part of this learning process is knowing the difference between the singular and plural forms of the nouns which, in English, is not always easy to determine.

The easiest way to form a plural noun is to add an -s to the end of the word, or -es if the word already ends in an s-sound (which for this purpose also includes the ch-, sh- and x-sounds). Most nouns will follow this pattern.

Other nouns are irregular – that is, their plural forms do not match the -s or -es standard format.

Some nouns revert back to their Latin or Greek roots when pluralized.

If the noun ends in a -y (other than proper nouns like Saturday or January), then the standard plural form uses -ies.

Over the course of time, as the English language has grown and changed, some words have lost their singular form, or the meaning of the forms has changed. For example, you might have seen signs in front of shops that offer “sundries” for sale. If you go into that shop and ask to purchase a sundry, though, you’ll get nothing but a puzzled look. The word sundry as a noun (meaning something separate or apart) is no longer used, but its plural form sundries is used and means “miscellany, odds and ends.”

Do you have questions about the plural form of a noun? Leave your questions in the comments section.