Plural Of Roof And Hoof

Hoof for instance becomes hooves in the plural.

Plural of roof and hoof.

The plural of hof is hofas which when pronounced would have sounded like hooves. English pluralization can be complicated. Hoof comes from the old english word hof. Hoofs is also a plural form of hoof the horny part of an animal s foot.

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. When at school i was taught that the plural of roof is rooves and the plural of hoof is hooves. But then at some point in the 80 s after i had moved to the west coast people were looking at me funny when i did that and my writing was corrected to roofs rooves still sounds right but now it looks weird. On the other hand spoof simply adds the plural s suffix to become spoofs.

Maybe my teachers were wrong. Hoofs is a much older rendering of the plural form of hoof. Poof and poofs follow the same rule. 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. 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. The plural form of hoof is hoofs or hooves.

But at the same time there are several exceptions form this rule. And this is how you get hoofs. And just like roof hoofs was the dominant one. 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.

Dwarf dwarves elf elves hoof hooves roof rooves. This is exactly how hooves is obtained as the first plural of the noun.