What words are always plural?

Answer 1

fish-

this is a tricky one ,

you can have 1 fish or many fish but if there are different types of fish, such as catfish mixed with flounder you have many FISHES

geese - singular goose

yet moose is always plural - 1 moose many moose

mice - singular mouse

lice - singular louse

How about: rice or wheat? [I am indulging, even if temporarily. I find that few people use the discussion areas except in a couple of specialized topics. All of this may go to Discussion eventually, but I wanted to share it before sending it to limbo.]

It's interesting that a question that appears so simple can have some subtle problems connected with it. Natural Val's original choices of geese, mice and lice I think are good. They are in fact always plural. Goose is not the same word as geese, and the questioner is seeking words that are always plural. Natural Val chose words whose plural forms don't follow the usual rules. Maybe that is the questioner's intention. Using the 'different word' argument though, we have to conclude that many if not all plural nouns [ie, acorns] that don't have identical singular and plural forms are in fact words that are always plural. The question may reduce to a tautology. Words that are always plural words are words that are only plural. I considered offering:

scissors

pants

rabies

which I thought could only exist in these plural forms, but there are problems with at least the first two, which indeed have singular forms. Rabies is considered a singular noun with rabies as the plural form.

Rice and wheat have their problems as well. The contributor clearly and correctly understands that if I am having rice with dinner, I'm not going to say "I had chicken and [hundreds of] rices... It [they?] was [were?] delicious. The problem is that they [rice and wheat] take singular form (probably always). I would not say that "Rice are [a] staple food[s] in many parts of the world."

There is something not the least bit trivial about this mystery over "pluralness". We seem to know much more than the simple information coded in our lexicon, and what we know, even the "simple stuff", can be very difficult to express.

Answer 2

A word (noun) that is plural is a word for two or morepeople, places, or things.

There are two types of plural noun forms, regular nouns and irregular nouns.

• Aregular pluralis a word that forms the plural by adding an -s or an -es to the end of the word.
• Anirregular pluralis a word that forms the plural in some other way.

Examples of regular plural nouns:

• apple: apples
• box: boxes
• church: churches
• dog: dogs
• egg: eggs
• glass: glasses

Examples or irregular plural nouns:

• baby: babies (nouns ending in -y preceded by a consonant, change the -y to -ies)
• lady: ladies
• calf: calves (nouns ending in -f or -fe, but not -ff or -ffe, change the -f or -fe to -ves)
• wife: wives
• hero: heroes (some nouns ending in -o add -es, some do not)
• tomato: tomatoes
• man: men (words from various origin languages that inherited differing plural forms)
• child: children
• foot: feet
• tooth: teeth
• mouse: mice
• crisis: crises
• parenthesis: parentheses
• fungus: fungi
• radius: radii
• antenna: antennae
• larva: larvae
• gymnasium: gymnasia
• datum: data