Merriam-Webster - Weird Plurals lyrics

Hi! Welcome to Ask the Editor. I'm Kory Stamper, an Associate Editor at Merriam-Webster. You may have seen the video in which I discussed the plurals of “octopus.” After I posted, I got a slew of e-mails that said, “But this doesn't explain all these other weird plurals.” To quote another one of our previous videos, “English is a mongrel of a language.” It began life as a hard-nosed Germanic dialect, was overrun by French-speaking Normans, had a thing for Latin and Greek borrowings, collected whatever linguistic crumbs fell out of its sea-faring merchant cla**es' coats, picked up house, moved across a few oceans, eavesdropped on the natives, settled down and invited its poor European and Eastern cousins to live with it, and then learned how to use a computer. You can't expect a language that's been that well traveled to be regular. “Goose” and “moose” are perfect examples of English's take-what-it-can-from-wherever-it-can history. “Goose” is a word that dates back about 1,000 years to the Old English “gōs.” And in Old English, the plural of “gōs” was “gēs.” Both the singular and plural forms were taken into Middle English and are preserved in modern English as “goose” and “geese.” “Moose,” on the other hand, is a relatively recent addition to the language. It's about 400 years old, and is borrowed directly from Algonquian—a North American native language that has no resemblance to Old English. Why would we give “moose” the Old English plural “meese”? Well, we wouldn't, because by the time “moose” came into English, we made plurals by adding an -s or -es to the ends of nouns. So, then why is the plural of “moose” “moose”? Because in English, we tend to use the singular form as the plural when talking about game animals like “deer” and “elk.” The final -s in “mooses” got dropped and voilà—two “moose.” English is a dynamic, changing critter, and—contrary to what some people may think—it always has been. Those irregular plurals are evidence of the richness of our profligate, weird language. For more “episopedes” of Ask the Editor, visit merriam-webster.com.