 
Word of the Week
Each week during UK term-time we add a new Word of the Week to this section. Experienced lexicographers draw on huge computer resources of current usage, normally accessible only to university departments and dictionary publishers, and provide a language activity for interesting follow-up work.
Tomato
Tomato is an example of a noun in English which ends in '-o'. Can you think of any others? For any word that you can think of that ends in '-o', write down the plural of that word: e.g. 'one photo' , 'two photos'. Is there a spelling rule for adding the plural '-s' to words like 'tomato' and 'photo'? The more words you come up with that end in '-o', the more you can see how inconsistent English spelling is! The plural of 'potato' is 'potatoes': with an extra 'e' added between the 'o' and the 's'. But the plural of 'piano' is 'pianos': with no extra 'e'.
Birmingham University holds a huge database of over 450 million words of modern English text, such as books, newspapers, magazines, junk mail, advertising material, etc. Language researchers use the database to check the frequencies of different spellings. The frequencies show that people are unsure about the plural of some '-o' words like 'cargo', 'hero', or 'volcano'.
By analysing all English nouns ending in '-o', it is possible to see certain patterns. First, if a word is an abbreviation or shortened form of a longer word, then no extra 'e' is added. This explains 'photos' (because 'photo' is a shortened form of 'photograph') as well as 'demos' ('demonstrations'), 'pros' ('professionals'), and 'memos' ('memorandum'). Another pattern is that words that have been clearly borrowed from another language don't add the extra 'e' in the plural. The more foreign-sounding the word, the less likely it is to be spelled with '-oes' in the plural. So we get spellings like 'stilettos', 'cellos', 'nintendos', 'chinos' etc. But there are exceptions - we usually write 'mangoes' (not 'mangos') but 'avocados' (not 'avocadoes'), even though both are exotic foreign fruits!
Language activity
Check out for yourself which '-o' words cause confusion over their plural forms. Oxford University has a database called the 'British National Corpus' (BNC) which is made up of thousands of samples of books, magazines, newspapers, etc. from the 1990s. You can do simple searches in this 100-million-word database yourself:
Go to the BNC web page.
Enter one word at a time and click the 'Solve it' button to get the results of the search. The software will tell you how many instances of your search word were found in the data. Try entering 'zeroes' and see how many hits you get. Then try the other plural spelling 'zeros'. Make a note of the frequency of each spelling.
You can think of your own list of '-o' words, or else try these:
radio, video, studio
tomato, potato, avocado, mango
drongo, weirdo, yobbo, bozo
hero, echo, veto, buffalo, tornado
tattoo, zoo, kangaroo
|
