Grammar Girl here. I'm Minyeon Fogredi and you can think of me as your friendly guide to

the English language, writing, history, rules, and cool stuff. Today I have a tidbit about

the two different ways we make words that end in Y plural, in case you've never noticed

it's a bit of a hodgepodge. And a quick and dirty tip about primers and primers.

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A member of our Facebook Grammar Girl group recently wrote in with a question about

plurals. He was wondering if we knew why the plurals of some words that end with the letter Y

take an S, whereas others take an IES. Rich, we have an answer for you. Fortunately, in English,

plurals do have some consistent rules. For example, most plurals are formed by simply adding S or

E S to the end of a word. If a noun ends with a sound that merges gracefully with the S sound,

you add an S. For example, dog becomes dogs and cat becomes cats. If a noun ends with a sound that

doesn't slide smoothly into an S sound, you add E S. This happens a lot with words that end

in S sounds like SH, CH, X, Z, and S. For example, church becomes churches,

buzz becomes buzzes and box becomes boxes, all with an E S on the end. A similar pattern happens

with words that end in Y. If the Y comes right after a consonant or the letters Q U, we change the Y

to IES. For example, lady becomes ladies, L A D I E S. Baby becomes babies, B A B I E S,

and soliloquy becomes soliloquies with an IES at the end. In contrast, if the Y comes right after

a vowel, we just add an S to the word to make it plural. So journey becomes journeys, J O U R N E Y S.

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