Mysterious Plurals

Sometimes I think that the only difference between me and all the people who feel utterly overwhelmed by grammar is my overdeveloped inclination to open a dictionary. This idea hit home recently after a friend e-mailed me with a question about plurals.

This friend is not just a professional writer but also a longtime copy editor. In fact, she’s the person I ask to cover for me on some of my freelance jobs when I go on vacation. She knows her way around the language. But she felt she needed my help recently. She was proofreading a manuscript of a novel for a friend and needed to know how to form the plural of “ho,” as in the slang term for “whore.”

“Any thoughts on this?” she asked.

I didn’t want to think. I wanted to know. So I went to Merriam-Webster’s website, m-w.com. (I chose Merriam-Webster over Webster’s New World, which at yourdictionary.com, because I knew she was editing a book and books are usually edited according to the guidelines in the Chicago Manual of Style, which uses MW as its go-to dictionary.)

I’ll confess, I was a little surprised to see what happened when I typed in “ho.” I got this.

ho – plural hos or hoes – slang: whore

There it was.

Now, dictionaries always list their preferred forms first. So from this we know that Merriam-Webster considers hos the standard plural. But personally, if I had the leeway, I’d go with hoes. Its similarity to the garden tool makes it easier to recognize the sound, unlike hos, which looks more like it would rhyme with Ross.

I told my friend so. She agreed. And I got to be the answer lady, just because I knew where to look for an answer.

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