[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