Plural Of Roof And Hoof

Just like roof hoof also started with two plural forms hoofs and hooves.

Plural of roof and hoof.

Should it become rooves like hooves. Hoofs is also a plural form of hoof the horny part of an animal s foot. Poof and poofs follow the same rule. English pluralization can be complicated.

On the other hand spoof simply adds the plural s suffix to become spoofs. But then at some point in the 80 s after i had moved to the west coast people were looking at me funny when i did that and my writing was corrected to roofs rooves still sounds right but now it looks weird. And this is how you get hoofs. For a good 250 years hoofs was the primary plural form of hoof analogized with the word roof which has roofs as a plural form.

Dwarf dwarves elf elves hoof hooves roof rooves. But at the same time there are several exceptions form this rule. Hoof for instance becomes hooves in the plural. Not all nouns follow simple rules when transitioning from single to plural form.

But hooves woke up in the 20th century and by about 1970 it overtook hoofs in usage and that s where it has stayed. For example roof chef and others these do not apply the previous rule but simply add the s normally at the end of the word after f in order to obtain the plural form. And just like roof hoofs was the dominant one. The plural form of hoof is hoofs or hooves.

Maybe my teachers were wrong. When to use hooves hooves is the newer and now more common plural form of the hoof. Hoof comes from the old english word hof. When at school i was taught that the plural of roof is rooves and the plural of hoof is hooves.

I was taught rooves in grade school on the east coast. This is exactly how hooves is obtained as the first plural of the noun.