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How do I express the plural of a letter in writing? My last name has two occurrences of the letter "s" in it, so in speech I tell people all the time that it's spelled "with two esses" However I don't know how to express such a thing in writing
Plural of The Letter S - English Language Usage Stack Exchange 2 You can avoid the confusion by pluralizing the name of the letter, ess, into esses She spent the afternoon ignoring the professor and drawing idly in her notebook, languidly doodling esses and then turning them into dragons
Is the addition of s ever correct for basic pluralization? From this Wikipedia page: It is generally acceptable to use apostrophes to show plurals of single lower-case letters, such as be sure to dot your i's and cross your t's Some style guides would prefer to use a change of font: dot your i s and cross your t s Upper case letters need no apostrophe (I got three As in my exams) except when there is a risk of misreading, such as at the start of a
Number agreement when using “ (s)” for optional plural I agree with Dave Nealon The plural form covers the singular meaning because it's used as a class For example, we say "one or more objects" to mean "one object or several objects" We read this quite naturally and have no problem with the lack of agreement in number implied by "one objects" As Dave points out, the plural doesn't preclude zero or one of the objects I find "one or more
it took me a long time vs I took a long time to do x Merriam-Webster arguably lists the sense of the highly polysemous verb 'take' used in the first example: take [10]e (2): to use up (space, time, etc ) [require] it takes a long time to dry Collins Cobuild ALD also gives examples close to the first sentence, adding no usage caveats: to take time [phrase]: If you say that something will take time, you mean that it will take a long time Change
(s) or s at the end of a word to denote one or many I like to use less- greater- than brackets, "<s>", which is more similar to parentheses than separation with a forward-slash, and has added benefit of making easier to parse with more clear distinction in cases of more different pluralizations than required by simply adding an ‘s’ or ‘es’ (e g also eliminating something, like ‘-us’ to ‘-i’)
When is the plural es pronounced ess ez izz vs. eez? The process-eez pronunciation is a hypercorrection, based on the misconception that process belongs to the other class of plurals which you've identified Latin singular nouns ending in -is are pluralized as -es '-eez': e g thesis, theses; axis, axes; metropolis, metropoles Some of them have only reached us in their plural forms: e g menses, testes
Focussed or focused? Rules for doubling the last consonant when . . . When you put the 2 ‘esses’ in - ie ‘focussed’ - the double ‘s’ ‘protects’ the ‘u’, and keeps it sounding soft, like the ‘u’ in ‘us’ This applies to many words and is really why we have double consonants in English The double consonant is there to tell you how to pronounce the word Examples:
What is it called when some pronounces their s sounds sharply I've long noticed that when it comes to pronouncing words containing an "s" sound, their are those that pronounce it softly and those that pronounce it sharply I have always wanted to put a name