Grammar girl here, this week Neil Whitman is guest writing.

He writes.

I read an interesting post recently on a blog called Errant Pedantry.

In this post, titled No Dice, Jonathan Owen traced the history of the English word Dice

and how, in his words, it slipped through the cracks of language change.

Today, we're going to talk about dice and other examples of language they got left behind.

This is the plural form of the singular noun die, a fact that I didn't realize until

I was a teenager.

Before then, I just thought the word was a noun like sheep, with the same form for both

singular and plural.

But even if you know that dice is the plural of die, isn't it strange that it's not just

dies with a Z sound at the end?

After all, the plural of pie is pie's, not pie's, and the plural of fly is flies, not

flies.

Even as an irregular plural dice is weird, the singular forms of mice and mice are mouse

and mouse, but the singular of dice isn't daos.

In his blog post, Owen explained that originally, the plural of die was spelled D-I-E-S. However,

at that time, all plurals that ended in S were actually pronounced with an S sound at

the end, not with a Z sound.

And probably sometime in the 1500s, a sound change occurred, so that for most nouns,

these plural endings came to be pronounced with a Z sound.

After this sound changed, the plural of die would have been pronounced with a Z sound

...