You will notice words like GRANITES in the word list and may wonder whether you can really have a plural of GRANITE. ‘What are those rocks over there?’ ‘Oh, they’re granites’, just doesn’t sound right, right? Wrong. The rule is that all nouns can have a plural unless the dictionary specifically says otherwise. So it’s fine to make words like:
There are a lot of irregular nouns that do not follow this rule, like mouse (mice) or sheep (sheep) – although you can make MOUSES, as mouse is a verb, to catch mice. As learners of English will testify, you can’t always tell if a noun is regular or not. It’s worth being careful with words adopted from other languages as these have sometimes kept their native plural form, like JEU where the plural is JEUX.
By Barry Grossman
Barry is a leading UK Scrabble player and winner of several tournaments. He is the author of Scrabble for Beginners (Chambers), Need to Know Scrabble, Scrabble – Play to Win and The Little Book of Scrabble Trickster. He has also contributed to numerous other books on the subject of words and word-games, has been a series champion of Channel 4’s Countdown, and has written four comedy series for BBC Radio 4. He lives in Hertford.
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