Plural Of Roof And Hoof

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

Plural of roof and hoof.

But at the same time there are several exceptions form this rule. 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 comes from the old english word hof. 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.

Not all nouns follow simple rules when transitioning from single to plural form. Hoof for instance becomes hooves in the plural. Poof and poofs follow the same rule. Hoofs is a much older rendering of the plural form of hoof.

This is exactly how hooves is obtained as the first plural of the noun. 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. English pluralization can be complicated.

Dwarf dwarves elf elves hoof hooves roof rooves. I was taught rooves in grade school on the east coast. And just like roof hoofs was the dominant one. The plural form of hoof is hoofs or hooves.

Should it become rooves like hooves. Just like roof hoof also started with two plural forms hoofs and hooves. Maybe my teachers were wrong. The plural of hof is hofas which when pronounced would have sounded like hooves.

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.