The Linguistic Reason Why the Plural of Moose Isn’t Meese

It's a wild grammatical moose chase.

meeseRebecca C. Photography

Some words just get lost in translation. For example, the Filipino word gigil means that something is just so unbearably cute that you have to pinch or squeeze it. (Here are 11 other quirky foreign words that have no equivalent in the English language.) Other words may not get lost entirely, but might get a little fragmented in the process. A prime example would be the word moose.


Words like goose, tooth, and foot, date back up to a thousand years before moose, when Old English was the only form of English. Back then, pluralization was different; mutations, or sound changes to words, would denote whether or not certain words were plural or singular. As Oxford Dictionaries puts it, a mutation is: “a change in the sound of a vowel produced by partial assimilation to an adjacent sound (usually that of a vowel or semivowel in the following syllable).”

As time wore on, words which used mutations for pluralization were replaced by the more standard modern plural ending (-s) or held onto the pluralizations from their original languages (fungus retained its Latin pluralization of fungi.) Moose fell into the latter category; its origins can be traced back to both the Eastern Algonquian and Narragansett languages, which used neither mutations nor the standard modern pluralizations.

Now that you know the origin of the word moose, learn which words and phrases you’ve been saying wrong this whole time.

[Source: Oxford Dictionaries]

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