Plural Of Roof And Hoof

Dwarf dwarves elf elves hoof hooves roof rooves.

Plural of roof and hoof.

I was taught rooves in grade school on the east coast. Just like roof hoof also started with two plural forms hoofs and hooves. The plural of hof is hofas which when pronounced would have sounded like hooves. Poof and poofs follow the same rule.

Hoofs is a much older rendering of the plural form of hoof. Hoof for instance becomes hooves in the plural. When to use hooves hooves is the newer and now more common plural form of the hoof. 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.

When at school i was taught that the plural of roof is rooves and the plural of hoof is hooves. Hoofs is also a plural form of hoof the horny part of an animal s foot. 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. Should it become rooves like hooves.

Not all nouns follow simple rules when transitioning from single to plural form. And just like roof hoofs was the dominant one. The plural form of hoof is hoofs or hooves. And this is how you get hoofs.

This is exactly how hooves is obtained as the first plural of the noun. Maybe my teachers were wrong. But at the same time there are several exceptions form this rule. It wasn t until the last 40 50 years that hooves began to pick up steam.

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. Hoof comes from the old english word hof.