T he English language is illogical. Our pronunciation is a mess (it is tough to cough under the boughs in Scarborough); we say things we do not mean (‘Walls have ears, so do not spill the beans’); and our spelling system is absurd.

As I pointed out in an earlier Wordplay article, there are 13 ways of spelling the ‘sh’ sound (as in short, sugar, issue, mansion, fission, ration, suspicion, ocean, conscious, chaperon, schist, fuchsia and pshaw).

Spelling often creates problems when we try to think of the plural for a particular noun.

The difficulties were exemplified in a poem which starts: We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes, But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.

Then one fowl is a goose, but two are called geese, Yet the plural of mouse should never be meese.

You may find a lone mouse or a whole nest of mice, But the plural of house is houses, not hice.

Most words that end with a sibilant (a hissing sound like s, sh, ch or x) make their plurals by adding -es (churches, foxes).

So why, you may ask, do we say ‘oxen’ and not ‘oxes’?

The Oxford English Dictionary explains: “Ox is the only word in general English use which retains the orig. plural ending -en (the reflex of Old English -an) of the weak declension.”

In fact the Old English plural -en exists in several words, including brethren (plural of brother), children, and even men and women.

Old English is also responsible for goose/geese and tooth/teeth, although I barely understand the OED’s explanation of mice: “The Old English plural mys arises from i-mutation of the stem vowel, and shows the normal subsequent development of Old English y. Occasional secondary plural forms are found (as mices, meses, meesen, etc.), especially in regional use, as well as new plural forms showing addition of a regular plural morpheme to the singular stem (mouses, mousen)”.

Plurals should be a simple matter of adding -s at the end of most words, but there are so many variations that it is not surprising if people — especially foreign learners of English — are perplexed.

Words we borrowed from Greek or Latin can have strange plurals. Greek borrowings like criterion and phenomenon have the unusual plurals criteria and phenomena. Latin-derived terms explain such plurals as data, appendices, stimuli and formulae.

Nouns ending with a consonant followed by -y usually make their plurals by turning the -y into -ies (pastry/pastries), but we say lay-bys, not lay-bies.

However, some proper nouns ending in -y simply add -s (‘There were two Germanys before 1989’).

Even more contentious are the plurals of words ending in -o. We write photos but heroes. What is the plural of beano or mosquito? (the Concise Oxford Dictionary recommends beanos but mosquitoes). And how about the plural of concerto: should we say concertos, concertoes or concerti? (the COD suggests the first and third).

The American vice-president Dan Quayle was probably misled by the plural form potatoes when he notoriously made a fool of himself by correcting a student’s spelling of ‘potato’ to ‘potatoe’ in 1992.

The COD is more tolerant about such words as hoof and dwarf, allowing you the option of using hoofs or hooves, dwarfs or dwarves. J R R Tolkien used dwarves in The Lord of the Rings, although he would have preferred to use the even older form dwarrows.

Many animals are spelt the same whether there is one or more (one sheep, two sheep; one trout, two trout). The same applies to many weights and measures (‘It is ten foot long’; ‘a five-amp fuse’).

Dice may nowadays be used as a singular (‘We need a dice for this game’) but it is actually the plural of die.