Irregular Plural Nouns, Part IV | The parts of speech | Grammar

- [Voiceover] Hello, grammarians.

Welcome to Irregular Plurals, Part IV.

The Mutant Plurals. (moans)

Yes friends, these words
have mutant superpowers

in that they can transform weirdly

and obnoxiously, not
obeying any other rules

of English pluralization.

But here's the cool thing.

There are only seven words
that behave this way.

What way?

I'll explain by writing all of them down.

The words are foot,

woman,

man,

tooth,

goose,

mouse,

louse.

Looks pretty straightforward, right?

The thing about these words is that none

of them take s as a plural.

So the plural of foot is not foots,

the plural of woman is not womans,

the plural of tooth is not tooths.

The reason these are called mutant plurals

is because the vowel sound,

the ooh, or the uh, or the ah, or the ooh,

or the ooh, or the ou,
or the ou, turns into

a different sound, turns
into a different vowel sound.

So the plural of foot
is not foots, but feet.

The plural of woman is
not womans, but women.

The plural of man is not mans, but men.

The plural of tooth is
not tooths, but teeth.

The plural of goose is
not gooses, but geese.

The plural of mouse is
not mouses, but mice.

And the plural of louse
is not louses, but lice.

You can see that mouse and louse actually

change their end spelling as well

from se to ce.

Even though it's the same sound,

louse, lice, for whatever reason,

just from some quirk of our spelling history,

not only do we change the vowels

used here, we also change
the consonants you say.

Why is this the case?

I'm so glad you asked.

I'm going to save that for another video.

In the meantime, just these seven words.

One, two, three, four, five,

six, seven, are the only

words in English that behave this way.

So you're in luck.

This is a handful of words to memorize.

And provided you're not borrowing any one

else' hats, ideally
you won't have to worry

about lice very often.

That's my hope.

You can learn anything.

David out.