It is something of a platitude among native speakers of English to say that our language is a motley one. It is a West Germanic language that has taken in an enormous amount of vocabulary from non-Germanic languages, especially French, Latin, and Ancient Greek. These other languages have systems for the pluralization of nouns that differ from the predominant system in English and, in some cases, users of English have favored pluralizing nouns derived from other languages according to the morphological rules of the word’s language of origin. As a result of this and other factors, pluralizing nouns in English is sometimes a controversial subject.
One of the most controversial of all English nouns to pluralize is octopus, which ultimately derives from the Greek word ὀκτώπους (oktṓpous), which is a compound of the Greek word ὀκτώ (oktṓ), meaning “eight,” and the noun πούς (poús), meaning “foot” or “leg.” English-speakers have tried to pluralize this noun in various ways, with the most popular plural forms being octopuses and octopi. But which plural for this word is the most pedantically correct? In this post, I will delve into the wonderful and exciting world of etymology to answer this question.
Background on nouns in Ancient Greek
In Ancient Greek, every noun has a grammatical gender of masculine, feminine, or neuter. When a person wants to use a noun, they decline it (i.e., change the form) according to number and case. Number indicates whether a noun is singular or plural (or, in some rare cases, dual) and case indicates how the person is using the noun syntactically.
A total of five noun cases exist in Ancient Greek: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative. A noun may take a different form in each number and case, with the exception that, for all nouns, the vocative plural is always identical to the nominative plural across all genders and declensions. As a result of this, a single noun in Ancient Greek may have up to five different singular forms and four different plural forms: one form for each of the five different cases, minus the vocative plural.
For our purposes today, we will ignore the genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative cases and focus on the nominative, which the case that a person uses for a noun when it is the subject of a clause.
ὀκτώπους in Ancient Greek
In Ancient Greek, the most common name for the creature that English speakers know today as an octopus was actually πολύπους (polýpous), which is formed from the prefix πολυ- (poly-), which means “many,” plus the word πούς (poús), which means “foot” or “leg.” This is the word that the Greek philosopher Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BCE) uses for the creature throughout his various treatises on natural philosophy.
The word ὀκτώπους, by contrast, occurs in Greek mainly as a common adjective meaning “eight-legged” and it is not unambiguously attested as a name for the creature that English-speakers call an octopus until quite late.
The earliest attested use of the word ὀκτώπους as an adjective is in a fragment (fr. 80 Shorey) of a lost play by the Athenian comic playwright Kratinos (lived c. 519 – c. 422 BCE), which the medieval Greek scholar Photios (lived c. 810 – 893 CE) preserves through quotation in his own work (p. 326.19). The fragment reads: “ὀκτώπουν ἀνεγείρεις” (“You are stirring up an eight-legged thing!”).
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a Minoan terra-cotta vase dating to around 1500 BCE depicting an octopus, currently held in the Herakleion Archaeological Museum on Krete
Unfortunately, it is not clear whether the “eight-legged thing” that Kratinos references in this fragment is the same creature that twenty-first-century English-speakers know as an octopus, since we have no information about the fragment’s context.
It is possible that the “eight-legged thing” Kratinos references may be a crab, since later Greek writers use forms of the word ὀκτώπους to describe crabs. For instance, the Batrachomyomachia or Battle of the Frogs and the Mice, an anonymous comic mock epic poem in dactylic hexameter that was most likely written in around the late fourth century BCE, uses a plural form of the word in reference to crabs in line 298:
“ὀκτάποδες, δικάρηνοι, ἀχειρέες, οἱ δὲ καλεῦνται καρκίνοι.”
This means, in my own translation:
“They are eight-legged, two-headed, handless, and they are called crabs.”
Similarly, the Roman poet Statyllius Flaccus, who most likely flourished sometime around the beginning of the first century CE, uses the same word as an epithet to describe a crab in the following poem, which is preserved in the Greek Anthology 6.196:
“Ῥαιβοσκελῆ, δίχαλον, ἀμμοδύτορα
ὀπισθοβάμον᾿, ἀτράχηλον, ὀκτάπουν,
νήκταν, τερεμνόνωτον, ὀστρακόχροα,
τῷ Πανὶ τὸν πάγουρον ὁρμιηβόλος,
ἄγρας ἀπαρχάν, ἀντίθησι Κώπασος.”
This means, in my own translation:
“The line-fisher Kopasos dedicates to Pan
as a firstfruit of his catch the crab,
the bandy-legged, two-clawed, sand-diving,
backward-walking, neckless, eight-legged,
solid-backed, hard-skinned swimmer.”
Eventually, by late antiquity, Greek writers had begun to use the word ὀκτάπους (oktápous) to describe the creature that modern English speakers know as an octopus. The Greek medical writer Alexandros of Tralleis (lived c. 525 – c. 605 CE) uses the word with this meaning in his Twelve Books on Medicine 7.1.
ABOVE: Photograph from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website showing a Hellenistic bronze crab dating to between the third and first centuries BCE
Pluralizing ὀκτώπους in Ancient Greek
Now that we’ve examined evidence for the usage of the word ὀκτώπους in Ancient Greek, let’s talk about how one should pluralize it. ὀκτώπους declines as a third-declension masculine noun and the Greek third declension nominative plural ending for masculine and feminine nouns is -ες (-es). Based on this, someone might assume that the plural form of octopus according to Greek declension rules should be octopuses. This, however, would be incorrect.
In Greek, all noun forms other than the nominative singular are formed from the root stem, which is not always predictable from the nominative singular form. Thus, the root stem of ὀκτώπους is actually ὀκτώποδ- (oktṓpod-). To derive the nominative plural form of the noun, we must take this stem and add the third-declension masculine nominative plural ending. This gives us the marvelous, delightful plural form ὀκτώποδες (oktṓpodes).
If, therefore, a person wishes to be pedantically etymologically correct, then the plural form of the word octopus is octopodes. If we apply the standard rules for English pronunciation of Greek words, then this should be pronounced something like /ɔk.ˈtou.pɔ.dɛz/, with the third ⟨o⟩ and the final ⟨e⟩ both being pronounced as short, since they are both short vowels in Greek.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a singular octopus swimming
Where the incorrect plural form octopi comes from
The Greek diphthong ου (ou) is usually Latinized as a long ⟨ū⟩. Thus, the Greek word πούς (poús), which forms the second component of the word ὀκτώπους, becomes pūs in Latin.
In antiquity, the word ὀκτώπους was rare in Greek and consequently never entered into Latin. In 1758, however, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (lived 1707 – 1778) published the tenth edition of his work Systema Naturae or System of Nature, in which he laid out the system of binomial classification for living things. In this work, he coined the word octopus as genus name in New Latin, deriving the name from its Greek roots, possibly unaware that the word had existed in Ancient Greek.
The word octopus swiftly passed from New Latin into scientific English. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)’s online entry for the word lists its earliest attested use in English as occurring in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London volume 50, published in 1759, on page 778 in the following quotation: “The Polypus, particularly so called, the Octopus, Preke, or Pour-contrel . . .”
Unfortunately, some confusion about the word’s morphology seems to have arisen quite early. In Latin, second-declension masculine nouns end in -us in the nominative singular and end in -ī in the nominative plural. English speakers have often continued to use the second-declension masculine nominative plural ending for Latin second-declension masculine nouns that we have imported into English. For instance, people often pluralize syllabus as syllabi, cactus as cacti, and so forth.
Despite the fact that octopus does not derive from a Latin second-declension masculine noun, the fact that the word ended in -us made it superficially look as though it did. Consequently, people began trying to pluralize it as a Latin second-declension masculine noun, inventing the plural form octopi. The OED‘s earliest citation for the plural form octopi comes from 1834 in Edward Griffith’s Cuvier’s Animal Kingdom XII. 291, with the quotation: “The octopi also feed on conchyliferous mollusca.”
ABOVE: Photograph showing a diver next to a gigantic octopus
Conclusion
How one pluralizes octopus therefore depends on how much of a pedant one wishes to be. If one does not wish to be a pedant, then the Anglicized plural octopuses is completely acceptable. If, on the other hand, one does wish to be pedant and obnoxiously show off their knowledge of classical morphology, then one can use the plural form octopodes.
I, however, will always regard the plural form octopi as categorically unacceptable because it is not a regular English plural and it is based on an incorrect assumption about the etymology of octopus. I’m not enough of an asshole to correct someone when they use the plural form octopi, but it still grates the gears of my inner pedant a little bit every time I hear it.
ABOVE: The Pedant, early nineteenth-century caricature by Thomas Rowlandson (lived 1757 – 1827), drawn in pencil, ink, and watercolor
This reminds me of the ridiculous word “lingerie.” The usual pronunciation does not follow the rules of either French or English, and I’m not sure where it came from!
But “correct usage,” in any language, is simply what most people say. So “lingerie” is pronounced according to no known system, and “octopus” is pluralized likewise.
Yes, of course, I absolutely agree. This post is not really intended to lay down the law about how people are allowed to speak; instead, it is meant more a fun exploration of what the most pedantic plural form for the word based on classical etymology would be.
Same problem with “platypus” ;-).
Given that there seems to have arisen a practice of pluralizing “-us” words with “-i”, couldn’t we just declare that to be a perfectly valid English rule? (Depending on how much of a descriptive vs. prescriptive grammarian one wants to be). Personally, I have no fixed habit on “octopus”, and have to stop and think whenever I need to do it, which fortunately doesn’t happen very often.
PS: Looks like the last time I had to worry about this was in a course essay I wrote 3-1/2 years ago. I used “octopuses”.
I never realized the -pus in platypus was the same as in octopus! Perhaps because my brain can parse octo- but not platy-. It’s always been “platypuses” for me, no question.
(I prefer octopussies. Also anonymice, because obviously “mus” is “mouse”.)
Yes, indeed! Platypus comes from the Greek word πλατύς (platýs), meaning “flat,” plus the word πούς (poús), meaning “foot” or “leg.” Interestingly, the word πλατύς is cognate to the English word “flat” and πούς is cognate to the English word “foot,” since they derive from the same Proto-Indo-European root words. Thus, platypus is a doublet of the English word flatfoot.
If that doesn’t blow your mind, the platy- in platypus is also cognate to the name of the philosopher Plato, whose name in Greek is Πλάτων (Plátōn), which derives from πλατύς. He is said to have been given this nickname either because of his flat, broad forehead, because of his broad build, or (less probably) because of his broad eloquence.
Wow, I like that! (the flatfoot thing, Plato is in this context much less interesting)
I have jokingly described one broccoli floret as a broccolus, one strand of spaghetti as a spaghettus, and one sushi roll as a sushus, to apply the “rule” the other way.
Well, in Italian, “broccoli” and “spaghetti” are the plurals of “broccolo” and “spaghetto”, which are ultimately derived from Latin “brocus” and “spacus”, whose plurals are, you guessed it, “broci” and “spaci”. So you weren’t too far off with those.
“Sushi”, on the other hand, is from Japanese, which doesn’t even have plurals since it uses noun classifiers.
It’s also interesting that spaghetti was borrowed into some Slavic languages too but since the plural ending -i exists in most Slavic languages too, their form was understood as almost native and the singular forms were easy to derive – but they are just without the -i.
I’ll remember this the next time I ride a taxus.
And “taxi” is short for “taximeter”, whose prefix is ultimately derived from Latin “taxa”, and the “i” may have come in due to the influence of Greek “taxis”.
By the way, it’s been a long time since I last ate a kiwus.
Well, personally, I’m the penultimate prescriptivist!
Surely, in any reasonable universe, the plural of platypus should be platyplus?!
😉
‘English doesn’t borrow from other languages: it follows other languages down dark alleys, beats them up, and goes through their pockets for loose change.’
-George Bernard Shaw
Etymologically pedantically correct is the best kind of correct, of course- not to mention that ‘octopodes’ is more fun.
That’s the real reason why I love it so much!
I assume you know that it wasn’t George Bernard Shaw who said this, it was Canadian SF fan writer James Nicoll on Usenet nearly a century after Shaw.
I’ve enjoyed the sentiment of the quote for some time. In a quick search to get the wording correct, I clicked the top result and accepted the attribution given. Shame on me: I know better.
Thank you, Tamara
And this is how I learned that the usual Spanish word for octopus, pulpo, comes from Latin polypus. By the way, pulpo is a cognate of pólipo, which means polyp. Your blog educates its readers even in ways you probably hadn’t expected. 🙂
That’s awesome! It always makes me glad to hear that my readers are making connections between things I say and things they already know! My primary goal in writing this blog is always to help educate people and bring academic knowledge to a wider audience.
Note, by the way, that Latin polypus, though it comes from Greek πολύπους, is nonetheless second declension, with nominative plural polypi. So if octopi is a mistake, it appears to be the sort of mistake the Romans themselves happily made.
A minor matter, but surely something Aulus Gellius would discuss if he were an English speaker!
Now I am curious how Linnaeus pluralised the word in his (Latin) works, maybe something for me to look up
I very much agree with you, the form ‘octopi’ is really annoying!
I’ve always had something of a soft spot for writers like Aulus Gellius, Klaudios Ailianos, and Athenaios (and, of course, their predecessors Pamphile and Favorinus, whose writings sadly have not survived). In some ways, I have often thought of my blog as something along the lines of a twenty-first-century equivalent of their writings.
We are akin in this regard: I’m very fond of them myself. Perhaps that is why I like your blog so much!
I strongly dislike octopi because it’s pseudo-learned. In serious usage I would certainly go for octopuses, but a number of possibilities seem open to use in opposition to the pseudo-etymological octopi (though there are so many people who use this that if we had a convention of them, they would fill many “bi”, which is of course the plural of “bus”.
There’s octopodes if you’re feeling really salty, or octopods to accommodate it a bit more to English. But the choice that appeals to me is to assume that Linnaeus is responsible for the word’s presence in English. He used the word as Latin, and as you say, we don’t know which declension. But the event that always delights me in Latin reading groups is when we come upon a word ending in -us and we can’t do anything with nom. sg. (probably) masc. Eventually someone will say, “Is it fourth declension?” and there’s a pause, and then everyone goes “Ahh!” as the problem is solved, and a gen. sg. or a nom. or acc. pl. will work. If we assume that Linnaeus introduced it as 4th declension, then the plural would be octopus with a long u; and this would have the further merit of being indistinguishable in writing from the phenomenon of invariable plurals in English for the names of some animals (as, “a herd of deer,” or “a school of fish” (fish being, in this zoological context, animals).
What is it that roareth thus?
Can it be a Motor Bus?
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Motor_Bus)
In case you’re wondering, “bus” is short for “omnibus” which in Latin is not a nominative singular, but a dative/ablative plural (of “omnis”, meaning “all”).
I actually knew that! When (horse-drawn) omnibuses first appeared someone wanted to make it clear that they were “for everybody”.
As usual, I really loved your article, and will definitely reference it when and if someone asks me about the plural of ‘octopus’; at the same time, as a linguistics pedant, I have a hard disagree for the conclusions of your article. ‘Rules’ in languages are just tendencies based on how native speakers of said language act and speak, and nothing else. There are countless examples of words which have unusual declension patterns based on erroneous understanding of a word’s class.
An example from my native Italian, when ‘tempus’ was reanalyzed as a 2nd declension masculine noun, but mantained the usual plural ‘tempora’, this created a pattern of 2nd declension nouns that continued into Italian, with words like ‘tempo’ pluralized as ‘tempora’, but also other ones, such as ‘grado, gradora’, or even Germanic loanwords, such as ‘borgo, borgora’. Also, the plural of ‘pecus’, ‘pecora’, was mistaken for a 1st-declension singular noun, and became the singular word for ‘sheep’ in Italian.
‘Octopi’ isn’t any different than this reanalysis pattern, so it’s not ‘wrong’ per se, since native speakers use it all the time. That doesn’t mean you cannot personally dislike it, for instance I heavily dislike the Italian ‘karakiri’ for ‘harakiri’, but that doesn’t make it ‘wrong’.
Also, I got to say, George Bernard Shaw’s quote often appears in r/badlinguistics, and it’s actually kind of become a ‘motto’ for the subreddit; it’s a rather annoying example of English exceptionalism which really has no basis in reality. While certainly the amount of loanwords in the basic vocabulary is generally greater in English than in other European language, except maybe Maltese, the amount of loaned vocabulary in English is comparable to the Sanskrit loans in Tamil, the Sino-Japanese words in Japanese, and it’s not even comparable to languages like Ottoman Turkish, when aroun 90 per cent of the vocabulary was loaned.
Now that I think of it, a common loan word that has entered many languages from Italian would probably be “pizza” since that food as spread and become part of the cuisine in many nations and cultures.
And few languages other than Italian keep the original plural.
On the topic of animal plurals, why is the plural form of goose “geese” but moose is “mooses” and not “meese”?
“It may be observed that in this book as in The Hobbit the form dwarves is used, although the dictionaries tell us that the plural of dwarf is dwarfs. It should be dwarrows (or dwerrows), if singular and plural had each gone its own way down the years, as have man and men, or goose and geese. But we no longer speak of a dwarf as often as we do of a man, or even of a goose, and memories have not been fresh enough among Men to keep hold of a special plural for a race now abandoned to folk-tales, where at least a shadow of truth is preserved, or at last to nonsense stories in which they have become mere figures of fun.”
— J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, appendix F
Similarly, we may say that we don’t speak of a moose as often as we do of a goose, I guess.
A brief perusal of Wikipedia shows that “goose” is of European etymology, whereas “moose” is from Algonquian. I suspect this accounts for the difference in pluralization (but consult a real linguist).
Although, Tolkien admitted privately that it started out as an error on his part.
Interesting!
Well, Spencer, I understand and agree with you that the plural of octopus should be octopuses. The name means eight (octo) footed (pus). To change pus to pi is to do away with the meaning of pus and turn it into something with a completely different meaning. It then becomes the word for the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. We don’t want to go there. Octopuses, given this rationale, would translate as “eight feet”. What would the Greek “pous” become when pluralized?
PS
Given the above, “octopi” would translate into “eight ratios of a circle’s circumference to its diameter”.
Can I ask you a question? I have heard that the God “Zeus” is actually called “Dios” or similar in most noun cases of Greek. How do these two words that sound so dissimilar to my ears end up being different cases of one word? And why did apparently the less used version be the one that ends up dominating in English?
I have also heard that in Greek the u in Zeus is actually used as a consonant and it would be more like “Zevs” or “Zefs” in pronunciation. Since my name is Zev I found that amusing but I know no Greek at all and wasn’t sure about it.
Could you clear either of these things up for me?
I can give some answers: since “Zeus” is the nominative in Greek, it got used in English as is almost always the case. And it started being pronounced in Greek as Zefs/Zevs in post-classical times.
On a related note, I love the Romanian word for God, “Dumnezeu” from “Dominus Deus”.
Generally some basic/important terminology can get rather odd forms in a language (see for example all the unpredictable forms of the word “to be” in English). In a language I am more acquainted with Latin, this is also the case for Jupiter and Venus, which respectively begin with Jov- and Vener- in all other declensions. In the case of Jupiter I have read that this is actually from “Jove pater”, but I am not sure. At any rate, due to this they are now called “Giove” and “Venere” in Italian, while in English where the words are a learned borrowing rather than naturally evolved, the original nominative forms have been kept (though one sometimes sees “Jove” in older literature as well).
As for pronunciation, generally the English is not a safe guide for how it sounds in the original. Wiktionary actually says it would have been /zděu̯s/ in Classical Attic and /zews/ or /zeɸs/ (ɸ being a sound somewhat close to f in English) in Roman-period Koine.
“/zděu̯s/”
I’m no good with phonetic script — how would you explain how to say this?
If that’s a hard d then I guess it makes more sense how that could turn into “Dios”.
I am not that proficient in phonetics either, but /z/ and /d/ should be roughly equivalent to English (that is, d would be pronounced ‘hard’ like English *day*). The diacritic above the e means it is extra-short (remember that phonemic wovel length was important, like Spencer has mentioned before) and the one between the u and s should mean they are ‘linked’ (pronounced without a break between).
As you say, with this pronunciation it is easier to see that “Dios” is a form of it. This also makes sense as the proto-Indoeuropean form is thought to be something like *dyéws
Calamari?
Kudos to Spencer and all the commentators! This was a great read that made me happy. Long live pedantry!
And if one of them was a lesbian, would that make her a sappholopod?
If they worshipped a mollusk version of Priapus, would he be a sea phallopod?
Only Spence can turn a topic from something so ordinary and make it into something interesting.
Thank you so much for your kind words! On this blog, I always strive to make boring things interesting. I am glad to know that you think I have succeeded in this endeavor.
For the record, my preference is “octopuses” (and “platypuses”).
Octopus is a loan word in English. Most English speakers don’t pronounce the word as Old Greeks did. It’s actually linguistically rare to borrow plural forms alongside singular ones. This “pedantry” is an odd invention of learned speakers, and even better, it applies only to Greek and Latin, and English has borrowed from many sources…
I remember attending a concert or something at a theatre in my country (probably an opera), and at the end, while we were clapping and the artists were bowing, someone among the public was shouting “Bravo!!! Brava!!! Brave!!! Bravi!!!” at each apparition of the singers. Definitely not Italian, just showing off.