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by YeGoblynQueenne 1952 days ago
>> But not Greek plurals, so it's octopuses, not octopodes.

With the exception of (one) phenomenon, (many) phenomena, hopefully?

Also, now that I think of it: pegasus/pegasi, prolegomenon/ prolegomena, lemma/ lemmata, schema/ schemata, etc etc. There's one ending in -omenon that I keep forgetting...

2 comments

As far as I can tell, the English rule is "sometimes we take the loanword's pluralisation, sometimes we don't, just memorise every single case and don't worry if you get it wrong sometimes"

For example, Samurai and Kimono are both loan words - but we import the pluralisation of Samurai (Seven Samurai) [1] whereas Kimono pluralises with an s on the end (Seven Kimonos) [2].

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/samurai [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kimono

"Criterion/criteria"
Thank you! Yeah, that's the one I keep forgetting, though it doesn't end in "omenon".
Another one I just remembered: "automaton/automata".

This site lets you search for English words by suffix, and the only words it can find ending in "-omenon" are "phenomenon" and... "superphenomon". What a phenomenal result.

https://www.litscape.com/word_tools/ends_with.php