Comment by rerdavies
4 days ago
Replace language with an actually sensible one, and press any key to continue!
If nothing else, that is a truly sadistic trivia question. I wonder if there are any other words in the English language whose plural form is spelled the same, but pronounced differently.
If you want to take the weirdness a step further, just look at the plural for "woman". When you write "women" you only change the second vowel, but when you pronounce that same word you only change the first.
I think all the others that do this are loanwords from French? We keep the silent s at the end in the singular, and make it audible in the plural - faux pas, corps, précis, etc.
There are a bunch of other heteronyms, but I can't think of others that differ specifically in the plural
Excellent! And even stranger. In French, the singular and plural forms have the same pronunciation! Damned Rosbif can't do ANYTHING right. lol.
The Artificial General Intelligence (Claude) gives a few more examples (but only after having been prompted with your examples):
- Rendezvous, hors d'eouvre, patois, chamois, bourgeois, glacis, fracas (dialect dependent), debris (rare), pince nez (dialect dependent).
Corps. And you do have past and present of reading spelled the same and pronounced differently.
It is a french word and it is inherently plural, sort of like pants, by my best guess, having only looked it up just now, singuler chassis would be a case.
So chassis, the thing full of parts, case, same thing but without the parts?