Why is sheep singular and plural

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Birds and the bees. Examples are mostly animals - deer, fish, moose, sheep, swine, buffalo - but also aircraft, stone weight , head cattle. Top Pages A-Z glossary punctuation A-Z confused words common mistakes ordered by seriousness Top Tip Get a grammar checker for your browser vocabulary for learners tests and games awkward plurals sayings and proverbs tattoo fails our Twitter page our YouTube channel.

Plural of Sheep Our Story Search Another Interactive Exercise Here are three randomly selected questions from another exercise on plurals, which can be edited, printed to create an exercise worksheet, or sent via email to friends or students. Deer is one of a set of words with irregular plural forms, such as sheep and fish.

Can you put 2 plural nouns that both end in s right beside each other? The reason is that in English, you can use nouns as adjectives, and adjectives never take a plural. The only correct plural of moose is moose. Sometimes, people add an S to moose, but that is incorrect.

Moose derives from Algonquian, a Native American language. A plural noun indicates that there is more than one of that noun while a singular noun indicates that there is just one of the noun. Most plural forms are created by simply adding an -s or —es to the end of the singular word. The most common plural form of fish is indeed fish. However, under certain circumstances, you can use fishes as the plural form of fish.

Fish can refer to multiple fish, especially when they are all the same species of fish. Fishes, however, usually refers to multiple species of fish, especially in scientific contexts. Food is a special one. This phenomenon replaced the plural forms of Old English—e. The words "horses" and "leaves" also came into existence through this phenomenon.

But words referring to food-animals, like "fish," "sheep," "deer," and "swine," were used in their singular forms, and so those words never benefitted from that pluralizing phenomenon. Even though it's hardly used now, "fish" did pass on its Old English plural, which just happened to be "fishes" which was spelled fiscas. But unlike "fish," the words "sheep," "deer," and "swine" simply had no plural forms to pass on to Modern English at all.

For a more detailed and nuanced explanation, see this study by linguist Fabienne Toupin at the University of Tours.