If one dairy animal that gives you milk is a cow, and two such animals are “cows”, you could be forgiven for thinking that if one little four-legged animal that gives you wool is sheep, two of them would be sheeps. You would be forgiven, but you’d still be wrong.
English is like that. It keeps you on your toes.
“Sheep” and “fish” don’t change at all in their plural form: one sheep, two sheep, three sheep; one fish, two fish, three fish; but if you’re talking about different types of fish, you could say “fishes”. .. “All the fishes in the sea”
How to indicate plurals
Adding an “s”
The most common form of plurals in English is shown by adding an “s” to a noun: girl/girls; boy/boys; book/books; computer/computers; meal/meals and so on.
Adding an “es”
Some words have an “es” to indicate that they are a plural: church/churches, box/boxes, bus/buses, bush/bushes, waltz/waltzes,
The general rule is that nouns that end in ch, x, s, sh and z have an es added to make them a plural. But, of course, as it’s English there are exceptions – as monarch/monarchs and stomach/stomachs testify. The difference, it seems, is how the “ch” is pronounced – a soft “ch” as in church or as the “k” in stomach.
Adding an “ies”
Many nouns that end in a “y” need an “ies” in the plural form: lady, ladies; baby, babies; activity, activities. But then the plural of “boy” is “boys”; of “ray” is “rays”; of “guy” is “guys”; and of alley is “alleys”. How you decide which form to use is by looking at what comes directly before the “y”. If the letter before the “y” is a consonant, the plural is the “ies” form; if the letter before the “y” is a vowel, the plural is the “s” form
Internal change in a word
Some words – irregular nouns – become plurals by a change inside them. So the plural of tooth is teeth, of foot is feet, mouse becomes mice, ox becomes oxen.
Proper names: BlackBerries or BlackBerrys?
Some brand names are so prominent in their field that they become a substitute name for a particular product: “Hoover” for vacuum cleaner; “Xerox” for photocopy and so on. The trade name “BlackBerry” was, for a while at least, a substitute name for a handheld mobile phone. If I have to use a plural form of BlackBerry, for example if it’s in a quote and you don’t want to change it, I would use “BlackBerrys”.
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