Plural Of Hoof And Roof

My dialect is primarily midlands.

Plural of hoof and roof.

The primary job of most roofs is to keep out water. So the best we can say is that the plural form of roof is variable where roofs is the preferred plural in many style manuals although i can see. Not all nouns follow simple rules when transitioning from single to plural form. Just like roof hoof also started with two plural forms hoofs and hooves.

The plural of roof the plural of roof is roofs. The noun roof adheres to the standard rules for forming the plurals of nouns in english shown in the table below. When to use hooves hooves is the newer and now more common plural form of the hoof. Hoofs is also a plural form of hoof the horny part of an animal s foot.

This is exactly how hooves is obtained as the first plural of the noun. But hooves woke up in the 20th century and by about 1970 it overtook hoofs in usage and that s where it has stayed. I say roof like food and hoof lik. Maybe my teachers were wrong.

It wasn t until the last 40 50 years that hooves began to pick up steam. Hoofs is a much older rendering of the plural form of hoof. Poof and poofs follow the same rule. And just like roof hoofs was the dominant one.

The plural of hof is hofas which when pronounced would have sounded like hooves. English pluralization can be complicated. Hoof for instance becomes hooves in the plural. 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.

Thus the plural of goof is goofs not gooves. When at school i was taught that the plural of roof is rooves and the plural of hoof is hooves. Roofs constructed of flat sloped sections are referred to as pitched roofs. And this is how you get hoofs.

And the plural forms roofs and hooves don t necessarily follow the singulars. 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. In any given region the pronunciation of roof doesn t necessarily follow with the pronunciation of hoof. Hoof comes from the old english word hof.