The plural of moose is, well, moose.
But why isn’t it meese, just as geese is the plural of goose? Well, it has to do with where the two words come from.
First, goose comes from Old English, and Old English speakers—rather than add an S to the end of a word to make it plural as we do today—would pluralize a word by changing the sound of the vowels in that word. This is why we have goose and geese, tooth and teeth, and foot and feet.
Second, moose comes from the Eastern Algonquian and Narragansett languages. As English evolved, speakers would pluralize words by either adding an S, as we commonly do, or holding onto the pluralization used in the language where the words originated. That’s why we have feet, fungi, and opera.
And the languages where moose originates never used the plural techniques we use today, so we just use the same word for singular and plural. But moose isn’t alone in being the same word for both the singular and plural forms. Here are 5 others I thought of:
- baggage
- deer
- furniture
- headquarters
- news
What are some other words that are the same for singular and plural? Let me know in the comments below.
