Editor's Corner

Good morning, folks!

A former employee and current friend sent me this article about the different plural endings of the term octopus, from Merriam-Webster. I think this article is perfect for October (which was the eighth month of the old Roman calendar) since octopus means eight feet.

Essentially, the article is about how we like to change the endings of words in English.

The three plurals for octopus come from the different ways the English language adopts plurals. Octopi is the oldest plural of octopus, coming from the belief that words of Latin origin should have Latin endings.

Octopuses was the next plural, giving the word an English ending to match its adoption as an English word.

Lastly, octopodes stemmed from the belief that because octopus is originally Greek, it should have a Greek ending.

When I was I kid, up until through college, they taught us those words from Latin kept their Latin endings, so here are a few examples of what they used to tell us the singular and plural were and what we’ve converted them to in English. I remember about halfway through my editing career, the “powers that be” decided we would start using the English endings on words since we speak English.

Then there’s data and datum, with stories of their own. Even spellcheck is giving me errors for datum!

In any case, this is the long story about how to refer to more than one octopus, and you can read more here. I tried to find you a short video about how smart they are, but I must be looking in the wrong place. Eight cheers for the eight-legged octopus!

Kara Church | Technical Editor, Advisory | Technical Publications

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