Plural Of Hoof And Roof

When to use hooves hooves is the newer and now more common plural form of the hoof.

Plural of hoof and roof.

And the plural forms roofs and hooves don t necessarily follow the singulars. The plural of hof is hofas which when pronounced would have sounded like hooves. But hooves woke up in the 20th century and by about 1970 it overtook hoofs in usage and that s where it has stayed. Should it become rooves like hooves.

When at school i was taught that the plural of roof is rooves and the plural of hoof is hooves. On the other hand spoof simply adds the plural s suffix to become spoofs. Maybe my teachers were wrong. English pluralization can be complicated.

But at the same time there are several exceptions form this rule. Not all nouns follow simple rules when transitioning from single to plural form. Poof and poofs follow the same rule. Roofs constructed of flat sloped sections are referred to as pitched roofs.

This is exactly how hooves is obtained as the first plural of the noun. 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. Hoof for instance becomes hooves in the plural. Hoofs is also a plural form of hoof the horny part of an animal s foot.

And this is how you get hoofs. Just like roof hoof also started with two plural forms hoofs and hooves. It wasn t until the last 40 50 years that hooves began to pick up steam. In any given region the pronunciation of roof doesn t necessarily follow with the pronunciation of hoof.

The primary job of most roofs is to keep out water. The noun roof adheres to the standard rules for forming the plurals of nouns in english shown in the table below. The plural of roof the plural of roof is roofs. 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.

And just like roof hoofs was the dominant one. Hoofs is a much older rendering of the plural form of hoof. Hoof comes from the old english word hof. I say roof like food and hoof lik.