I love Christmas music in general, and one song I think is especially cute goes like this.

I want a hip-a-podamist for Christmas.

Only hip-a-podamist will do.

But being Grammar Girl, the song also gets me thinking about the plural of hip-a-podamist,

because it's a common question.

Is it hip-a-podamuses or hip-a-podamai?

In dictionaries list both plurals and both forms regularly appear in writing that you'll

see today.

The word originally comes from Greek where it meant river horse and it came into English

through Latin.

Hip-a-podamai is the correct Latin plural form and still regularly appears in scientific

writing.

But words that come into English can also shed their Latin plurals and take the more

anglicized S or ES form.

And hip-a-podamuses appears more often in books and newspapers.

For example, a Google Books and Gram search shows that hip-a-podamuses is slightly more

common than hip-a-podamai.

And a New York Times Chronicle search shows that the Times clearly favors hip-a-podamuses.

Hip-a-podamai hasn't appeared in that paper since the 1930s according to that search tool.

And Garner's Modern American Usage also recommends hip-a-podamuses.

So when 10-year-old Gala P.V. sang and hip-a-podamuses like me too, she was using the correct

plural.

...