[neerajk]

aside: me after reading the headline: Shouldn't that be Octopii?

But no! "The plural form octopii is doubly incorrect. Firstly, octopus derives from Greek, not Latin; its etymologically-consistent plural form is octopodes. Secondly, even if octopus were a second-declension Latin noun, the plural form would be octopi; in the correct plurals radii and gladii, with which octopii is analogous, the first ‘i’s are part of the words’ stems (radi- and gladi-), and not their case endings — for octopii to be the plural, *octopius would need to be the singular."

Thanks wikipedia.

TIL!

[banannaise]

While I'm all for a history lesson (and the double-I octopii is indeed simply incorrect) I take issue with anyone insisting that "octopi" is wrong:

1. Language is neither static nor a series of rules to be blindly followed. The way a word was pluralized 1400 years ago has limited relevance today.

2. As noted just about everywhere, "octopodes" looks insane in any modern English sentence because we don't pluralize any other word that way. It also moves the emphasis to the second syllable. Thus it manages to make everybody's life harder for no benefit, a favorite pastime of the sort of people who would suggest this pluralization.

3. "Octopuses" feels stilted, and while it is correct, I thoroughly empathize with anyone uninterested in using a four-syllable word with three consecutive unstressed syllables in a sentence. Therefore it makes sense to create a shorter pluralization, and we can do this by analogy to other English words!

3a. We are not speaking Latin. If "-us" to "-i" is a valid pluralization of other English words, then it makes sense for it to be a valid pluralization of this word. While this pattern can be used irresponsibly ("bus" -> "bi"), using it for the three-syllable "octopus" is non-destructive. It preserves the structure (and the meter!) and thus makes a lot of sense.

4. To come back to "double-I octopii is simply incorrect": It's wrong because it's trying to be pedantic but uses the rules wrong (as noted in the wikipedia reference above). If, in 700 years, I were still alive, English were still spoken, and some band of idiots had managed to make "octopii" the most common pluralization, then I would begrudgingly accept it per point 1 above, but until then, no.

[saberience]

The best plural is simply keeping the word the same as the singular. I.e. "octopus". There are many animals using this form, e.g. fish, deer, elk, salmon, buffalo.

E.g. Look at all those octopus.

All the divers I know say it this way, easy to say, understand, doesn't make you sound like an asshole.

[yreg]

That's hardly 'the best'. Recognizable plural is a useful language feature.

[joenot443]

This is what I would say.

It does beg the question though, how’d we come up with the list of animals to pluralize like that? Why “five birds” but not “five deers?”

[philipov]

It raises the question - begging the question is something else.

As for the question, it probably has to do with the gender of the noun. I bet 'deer' derives from a neuter-gendered word in Anglo-Saxon, while 'bird' does not.

Noun gender is the system used by many languages to categorize words that have different declension rules. It's atrophied in English, but is implicitly still present in the various "inconsistencies" that pop up.

[joenot443]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question I actually had no idea about that distinction, appreciate it.

Noun gender makes a lot of sense.

[sandworm101]

Note that those are animal we generally hunt/eat. I'd bet this is tied to the language of the ruling/hunting classes of England, back when they spoke French more than English.

There are also some middle-ground words like "Shark". One goes fishing for "shark" like they would "fish" but it is more common to say "several sharks" using a plural as opposed to "several fish" using the singular. But "fishes" is still a word, which likely goes back to ruling classes who ate fish but generally did not hunt them as they would have deer.

[banannaise]

"Fishes" is a plural of a plural. You wouldn't likely say "two fishes", but you might say "all the fishes in the sea", referring to many groups of fish (much as you might refer to the "peoples of the world" referring to many cultures). Aside from that, I bet you're onto something.

[dylan604]

I think it was done just to make it harder for those languages that do not have a concept of plural. Of course I'm kidding, but it has to be super frustrating trying to learn it as ESL.

[card_zero]

> 3a. We are not speaking Latin.

This is why I would prefer say axises, basises, indexes, and matrixes. I mean as plurals of their respective singulars, not as plurals of octopus.

[Mystery-Machine]

> Language is neither static nor a series of rules to be blindly followed.

It's also not open to arbitrary subjective opinion. There are rules, this is not 'Nam. :) Languages evolve, but you can't just claim something is correct because you think so or you'd love it to be so. It's incorrect in English language, today. Maybe in the future, when more people start using the plural "octopi", it will be correct.

Fun fact: Oxford dictionary changed the definition of "literally" to also mean "figuratively". https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally

[banannaise]

> Maybe in the future, when more people start using the plural "octopi", it will be correct.

The future is now. "Octopi" is considered the correct plural by a significant plurality of US adults, and a plurality of all age groups.

https://x.com/YouGovAmerica/status/1749131745893679173

[Supermancho]

> It's also not open to arbitrary subjective opinion. There are rules

> Conversations follow rules of etiquette because conversations are social interactions, and therefore depend on social convention. Specific rules for conversation arise from the cooperative principle. Failure to adhere to these rules causes the conversation to deteriorate or eventually to end. Contributions to a conversation are responses to what has previously been said.

Both parties must agree on those rules. There is no mandate that one must follow another's rules, in the initial engagement. This is helpful to understand, in modern online discourse. If someone doesn't want to play by some basic rules, further engagement is likely futile and unproductive.

[feoren]

This is a strange argument to make against "octopuses". Break from our history; use the English standard; we are not speaking Latin ... therefore it should be octopi!? What? How about this: it's OK to use the traditional form if it's still commonly understood, but otherwise let's try to use a "standard English" form. Those are your choices: traditional for the word, or standard. Since "octopodes" is awkward and not really ever used, we say "octopuses". Why would you convert to a false-traditional version?

[VyseofArcadia]

> As noted just about everywhere, "octopodes" looks insane in any modern English sentence because we don't pluralize any other word that way.

I'm guessing "platypodes" doesn't count.

[Blikkentrekker]

All my friends say “octopodes”.

Some people on the internet keep saying that that's wrong; I find that very strange.

>because we don't pluralize any other word that way.

Certainly we do “platypodes”, “matrices”, “irides”, “clitorides” and “vortices”, are all quite common words.

[istjohn]

I had never heard of three out of five of your "quite common" words.

[jgwil2]

Clitorides? Come on, your pulling our legs.

[philipov]

> 2... It also moves the emphasis to the second syllable.

Octopods - 8 times better than regular pods.

[c0brac0bra]

I would prefer "octopoden"

[TrnsltLife]

There's "antipodes" though.

[jameshart]

Which implies that while the whole of ‘Australia and New Zealand’ can be referred to as ‘the antipodes’, Australia or New Zealand alone should be called ‘an antipus’.

[LegionMammal978]

"Antipous" has been used as a singular form of the word in some 19th-century works [0].

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/antipous#English

[cryptonector]

Yes, but 'octopodes' is really neat, and definitely a [nerdy] conversation starter.

[goldfeld]

But octopi is also trying to be pedantically latin, octopodes though it could be pedantic is at least correct, and entirely descriptive. In practice I wouldn't expect someone to say octopi to my face, but writing weird words online is another matter.

[iwontberude]

3. “Octopuses” sounds like what a child or English as Second Language speaker would say. Not sure what is stilted about being a novice to the language.

[banannaise]

And a child or ESL speaker will often use constructions that sound stilted. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.

"Stilted" is a bit of a judgy word, but it's not a value judgment of anyone else's intelligence. Some English speech sounds stilted. So it goes. That's why I don't prefer that pluralization in my own speech.

Lord knows I sound weird enough at times; I'm not here to throw stones from glass houses.

[thfuran]

Octopuses sounds like a proper English pluralization, not that nonsense about sticking other languages' grammar rules into English.

[gpderetta]

Incidentally, if, as per etymology, we consider the tentacles as feet, then the headline is wrong as the Octopodes are technically kicking the fishes.

[johnnyjeans]

Technically speaking, Octopuses don't have tentacles at all. Those are arms. The morphology of "Octopus" is actually a really great example case for demonstrating paraconsistent logic.

[Gravityloss]

Hmm so the name must be corrected to be 8-armed in Greek. Oktobratso? Oktooplizo? Oktocheiro?

[gpderetta]

It goes deeper than that! According to wikipedia, the tentacles, or appendages, are indeed called "arms", but they evolved from what in other molluscs is called a "foot"!

[kaiken1987]

Deeper still, one of those arms on males contains their sexual organs call the hectocotylus.

[cacois]

It's a house of cards, people!

[gpderetta]

yes, something is ... afoot.

[declan_roberts]

This whole thing is built on lies!

[kibwen]

But more generally, enough generations have passed that "octopus" is no longer a foreign word, it's now just part of the English lexicon, and so you're free to pluralize it in the standard English manner. "Octopuses" is correct by that reasoning.

Note that this is the same process that we eventually apply to every other loanword; next time you talk to a German, watch them cringe at "delicatessens" as the plural to "delicatessen".

[carlmr]

Delicatessen itself is a French loanword (délicatesse) in German that's wrongly pluralized, it should be délicatesses not delicatessen.

So it's like doubly wrong.

[mytailorisrich]

But according to Wikipedia, the French délicatesse is an Italian loanword (delicatezza)...

[crooked-v]

It's loan words all the way down. We just don't have enough info about prehistory to complete the chain all the way back to local variants of caveman speak.

[carlmr]

Cavemen would really hate our quintuple pluralization.

[shmeeed]

I'm waiting for myself to one day muster the courage to order "dos expressis" at a restaurant in Italy. But I fear the repercussions.

[airstrike]

https://imgur.com/8pQYSUd

[amatic]

Every time you order an "expresso", an Italian falls off a vespa.

[725686]

Touché!

[crazygringo]

I wonder why it is that "octopuses" just kind of sounds wrong?

Is it the repeated "s" at the end? But we have no problem saying "buses" or "rebuses".

Is it something to do with the plural of "fish" just being "fish"? But we have no problem making whales and dolphins plural with an -s.

Is it that "-puses" sounds slightly vulgar, like we're talking about multiple female genitalia?

I genuinely don't know. All I know is that "octopuses" just sounds wrong for some reason I can't put my finger on. And that "octopii" somehow "feels" much better, even if everything about it is logically wrong.

I'll still say "octopuses", but I know I always want to say "octopii" instead. (And spell it that way too, because "octopi" feels like it would rhyme with "canopy".)

[banannaise]

Because it turns it into a four-syllable word with three consecutive unstressed syllables. It has bad meter and ruins the meter of almost any sentence constructed around it.

[alwa]

I hadn’t thought about that, but that explanation suits me as to why “octopuses” comes off… I don’t know, muddy?… while the 1983 James Bond film named for the vulgar pun rolls off the tongue, even though they use virtually the same phonemes: it’s that the latter emphasizes the third syllable, making it metrical again.

Thank you for a nifty insight, whose effects I’d noticed but whose mechanism had never occurred to me before today!

[crazygringo]

But "teleporters" or "marathoners" or tons of other words follow the same pattern of stress and sound fine. "Photocopiers" extends it to four unstressed syllables and sounds fine.

[banannaise]

We treat words like they have a single stressed syllable and everything else is unstressed, and that's a useful abstraction sometimes, but that's not actually true. "Photocopiers" has primary stress on the first syllable but secondary on the third - PHO-to-CO-pi-ers. The same goes for "teleporters" and "marathoners".

But that also goes for "octopuses", so what gives? Seems like there's something else going on that my brain hasn't accounted for yet. It's probably that the plosives (stop consonants) are hugely unbalanced, with all of them coming in the first half of the word. Plosives, as the word implies, can add quite a bit of oomph to a word, even if they aren't reflected in the stress pattern. So "octopuses" seems to just peter out halfway through the word.

[r00fus]

All of these words have informal 3rd syllable stress so work fine.

[foldr]

In that case I say we go with oc-TO-pusses (as in photograph vs. photography).

[StrictDabbler]

The pronunciation of the word is already on the boundaries between "awk-toe-poos", "awk-tuh-puhs", and "awk-tah-piss" depending on your region just in America.

So adding an additional "-es" that can be "-ehhs" or "-iz" gives at least six possible pronunciations.

[FireBeyond]

> I'll still say "octopuses", but I know I always want to say "octopii" instead. (And spell it that way too, because "octopi" feels like it would rhyme with "canopy".)

There's a restaurant near here called Octapas.

[bmacho]

> I wonder why it is that "octopuses" just kind of sounds wrong?

There are some Latin words ending -us in English, that keep their Latin plurals. For octopuses, both plurals are common and acceptable.

[danans]

> I wonder why it is that "octopuses" just kind of sounds wrong?

Because of the english words with taboo meanings that coincidentally share the phonetic structure p-s-

[afiori]

The plural of fish is fish, but the plural of type of fish is fishes

[cyberpunk]

I’m sure I read a sci-fi novel some years back where one of the main characters selectively breeds octopuses for intelligence before dropping them on a terraformed planet and there was a small bit about how he didn’t like octopuses either and so called them octopii.

I’m in his boat ;)

fun book, forgot the name.

[mellavora]

But not as cool as "Whales on Stilts"

[yayitswei]

Could it be "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky?

(ht Claude)

[jayGlow]

it sounds more like the sequel "children of ruin" children of time primarily involves spiders.

[diggan]

> Could it be "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky?

Currently reading that one and there is no octopuses (only read half so far though) but a lot of spiders, ants and space-faring primates :)

[globular-toast]

Right. They are talking about the sequel, Children of Ruin.

[user982]

Children of Ruin.

[dougfulop]

Children of Time!

[jjtheblunt]

I think what you cited missed the spelling aberration, since the -pus is a mistake, as it should have been -pous,-podes (singular,plural, nominative). the word is just a chimera.

also, the reality is

#define octopi octopodes

#define octopuses octopodes

and so on is what's more or less going on...whereas in English octopodes is a mouthful.

[not_kurt_godel]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus#Etymology_and_pluralis...

[Aardwolf]

So the plural of virus, if it wouldn't have been viruses, would be viri, not virii? I think for octopus I'd have intuitively thought octopi, but for virus I'd have thought virii.

[jjk166]

Virus actually is a latin word, but the plural is vira.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/virus#Latin

[Rebelgecko]

The plural of the Latin virus is vira (second declension etc etc). However viri means "men"

[nerdponx]

It is in fact "viri".

[mellavora]

Yes, but always remember the plural of applepus is apple pie

[sigzero]

I am using octopodes from now on!

[fffrantz]

Thought exactly the same!