Gruesome plurals

When you work on ELT materials, you can end up researching all kinds of random topics and in lexicography, that mix can be even more unpredictable. Over recent months, I’ve been working on a lot of medical terminology; researching terms with the help of input from a specialist medical editor, then checking corpus evidence, finding usable examples, and putting together dictionary entries. It’s been fascinating learning the names for all kinds of body parts and working out how things fit together. Google image searches have been particularly useful for visualizing exactly where your unciform bone or suprachiasmatic nucleus are!

One thing that’s very noticeable is the amount of terminology that originates from Latin and Greek and has irregular plural forms that have to be checked and included. I’ve learnt that the plural of stroma is stromata, that more than one fimbria can be described as fimbriae, and that you have one tragus on each ear giving you a pair of tragi … amongst many many others.

However, there are many anatomical features which you only have one of, so while they’re technically countable nouns, they’re overwhelmingly used in the singular. And actually, many things which we have pairs of are predominantly referred to singularly too; The tragus is a small piece of cartilage on the inner side of the external ear.  So, when checking for plural forms, I often have to do quite a bit of searching.

I’ve gradually come to realize though that plural body parts only tend to crop up in medical research. Sometimes it’s a study involving several patients, which is okay. More often than not though, the plurals appear in rather gruesome animal experiments – in contexts that really ought to have trigger warnings for the unsuspecting! Thankfully, I’m mostly just checking that the irregular plural is used (and hasn’t been anglicized to stromas or traguses, sometimes the case for very common terms) and I don’t have to include any gruesome examples.