Plural Of Hoof And Roof

Should it become rooves like hooves.

Plural of hoof and roof.

And just like roof hoofs was the dominant one. And the plural forms roofs and hooves don t necessarily follow the singulars. Hoof for instance becomes hooves in the plural. But at the same time there are several exceptions form this rule.

In any given region the pronunciation of roof doesn t necessarily follow with the pronunciation of hoof. When at school i was taught that the plural of roof is rooves and the plural of hoof is hooves. The plural of hof is hofas which when pronounced would have sounded like hooves. Maybe my teachers were wrong.

Thus the plural of goof is goofs not gooves. The plural of roof the plural of roof is roofs. The primary job of most roofs is to keep out water. Hoofs is a much older rendering of the plural form of hoof.

For example roof chef and others these do not apply the previous rule but simply add the s normally at the end of the word after f in order to obtain the plural form. Poof and poofs follow the same rule. For a good 250 years hoofs was the primary plural form of hoof analogized with the word roof which has roofs as a plural form. But hooves woke up in the 20th century and by about 1970 it overtook hoofs in usage and that s where it has stayed.

Not all nouns follow simple rules when transitioning from single to plural form. Roofs constructed of flat sloped sections are referred to as pitched roofs. My dialect is primarily midlands. When to use hooves hooves is the newer and now more common plural form of the hoof.

So the best we can say is that the plural form of roof is variable where roofs is the preferred plural in many style manuals although i can see. On the other hand spoof simply adds the plural s suffix to become spoofs. It wasn t until the last 40 50 years that hooves began to pick up steam. Just like roof hoof also started with two plural forms hoofs and hooves.

Hoof comes from the old english word hof. This is exactly how hooves is obtained as the first plural of the noun. English pluralization can be complicated. The noun roof adheres to the standard rules for forming the plurals of nouns in english shown in the table below.