We happily refer to anything more than one foot as ‘feet’ and accept that the plural of goose is ‘geese’, so why isn’t the plural of moose ‘meese’? (Or mooses for that matter).
The simple answer is that it’s what’s known as a loanword – a word adopted from a foreign language with little or no modification. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word moose has its origins in the Native American Algonquian language. Adopted into English by the pilgrims who travelled to the New World (as the Americas were known) in the early 17th century, it comes from the Eastern Abenaki word ‘mos’.
But why then do we say geese instead of gooses?
After all, geese is an obvious exception to the standard plural of adding an ‘s’ or ‘es’ in English. Well, unless you want a complicated history of linguistics, take my word for it that the reason goes back hundreds of years to the beginnings of Old English and a shift in pronunciation known as a ‘mutation’. (In German, this is often denoted by the umlaut accent that looks like two little dots above the vowels ‘a’, ‘o’ and ‘u’.) The word moose entered English from the Algonquian language in the early 17th century – hundreds of years after the Old English vowel changes had occurred.
In fact, English is full of words that have been borrowed from other languages. These loanwords are estimated to make up half of all English words and have been enriching our language for over a thousand years. Many are so well established that we don’t realise they’re borrowed at all. For instance, Old Norse gave us freckle and egg; splinter and gherkin are Dutch; while hazard and alcohol are Arabic. And once they’ve been absorbed into English, most loanwords behave in the same way as other English words when it comes to forming their plurals: hazards, freckles, splinters and so on.
Yet some strange plurals still remain in the English language such as ‘tooth’ and ‘teeth’, ‘child’ and ‘children’, which do not conform to the usual rules. I’m sure you can think of more!
