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by DrJokepu 6217 days ago
Being a Latin geek myself I can't help but point out that nouns in the fourth declension (u stem) also end in -us in singular and receive an -us affix in plural as well.

"Virus" is however, in the second declension (virus -i n. "slime, poison, goo") with the oddity of being neutral while having a second declension -us ending which is normally a feature of masculine nouns. And indeed, its plural would be "viri".

1 comments

Neuter nouns of the second declension don't generally have plurals that end in -i, but rather in -a, so "vira" would be equally possible.

It's also important to note that scholars don't actually know the proper plural of virus because they haven't really found one in extant literature.

Wikipedia has a longer discussion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_of_virus#Virus

Doo doo doo doo, doo doodoo do, Doo doo doo doo, doo doodoo do, Doo doo doo doo, doo doodoo do, Doo, doodoodoo, doo doo doo doo doo....

A bit hard to communicate, but that's the keyboard cat playing all of you off.