Zeroes or zeros?

Question

Hi,according to what I remember from school and my gut feeling, zeroes would be the correct plural of zero.Having seen zeros as well, I looked it up and to my surprise both my German-English dictionary and Webster's include that spelling. Now I was wondering which one is "more correct", i.e. is zeros just a sloppy form that got allowed somewhen due to frequent use, is it a regional difference or simply a matter of personal taste?Thanks for any enlightenment,Malte

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[nq:1]Hi, according to what I remember from school and my gut feeling, zeroes would be the correct plural of zero. Having seen zeros as well,[/nq]
Zeros was the Greek *** of failed love.
[nq:1]I looked it up and to my surprise both my German-English dictionary and Webster's include that spelling. Now I was ... to frequent use, is it a regional difference or simply a matter of personal taste? Thanks for any enlightenment, Malte[/nq]
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[nq:1]Hi, according to what I remember from school and my gut feeling, zeroes would be the correct plural of zero. ... to frequent use, is it a regional difference or simply a matter of personal taste? Thanks for any enlightenment, Malte[/nq]Usually you only add "-es" rather than an "s" to make a plural when a final consonant (or consonant pair) is "x" or "s", "sh" or "ch". This is because the "s" sound is easily blurred into these and you have to add a vowel (and thus an extra syllable) to make the "-s" sound distinct from these preceding consonants. Words ending in other consonants won't have the "-s" sound blurring into the final consonant, so they would not be spoken with an extra syllable to separate the pluralizing "-s" sound.

I can't put my finger on the rule for -s versus -es for a word ending in -z or -tz or other buzzing/sibulant consonant forms, but my rule of thumb tells me that if I need to sort out the pluralizing "s" sound from the preceding sound I need to add a vowel: -es. I assume that if the word gerwertz were to be a new addition to English without any dictionary guidance as to proper spelling of the plural, the plural would be gerwertzes and not gerwertzs, under the "sort out the sounds" rule of thumb.

There is no need to do any of this in "zeroes", yet it is an included variant spelling in some dictionaries.
Zero is interesting in other ways, because the -o is pronounced as a long vowel even though it is standing alone. There is a tendency in English to require two vowels to make the first of them long: "ball" (short a) but "bale" (long a), "mad" (short) but "maid" or "made" (long a), etc. I wonder if the plural was once pronounced with some peculiar vowel sound in some quarters, requiring a diphthong -oe so that the long vowel -o was not used in the plural?

Zero is an oddball when it comes to spelling.

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(Email Removed) schrieb:
[nq:2]according to what I remember from school and my gut ... surprise both my German-English dictionary and Webster's include that spelling.[/nq]
[nq:1]Zero is interesting in other ways, because the -o is pronounced as a long vowel even though it is standing alone. Zero is an oddball when it comes to spelling.[/nq]
Webster's New Encyclopedic Dictionary, BD&L 1993, lists zero, pl zeros also zeroes
salvo, pl salvos or salvoes
solo, pl solos or soli
innuendo, pl -dos or -does
farrago, pl -goes (!)
alto, pl altos
soprano, pl -pranos
zoo, pl zoos
domino, pl -noes or -nos
I can only conclude that words ending in -o are oddballs when it comes to spelling.

Google web has zeros beat zeroes 2:1 (4:1 if limited to English pages), whilst google Usenet has it pretty much 1:1.
Cheers
Michael

It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas. Ronald Reagan, October 10, 1965

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[nq:1]Hi, according to what I remember from school and my gut feeling, zeroes would be the correct plural of zero. ... that got allowed somewhen due to frequent use, is it a regional difference or simply a matter of personal taste?[/nq]
'Zeroes' is correcter than 'zeros'. 'Zeros' looks funny. Personal taste, you say? Nah.
[nq:1]Thanks for any enlightenment,[/nq]
That's another kettle of fishes.

Charles Riggs
There are no accented letters in my email address

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[nq:1]Hi, according to what I remember from school and my gut feeling, zeroes would be the correct plural of zero. ... to frequent use, is it a regional difference or simply a matter of personal taste? Thanks for any enlightenment, Malte[/nq]
If a spelling variant appears in a general dictionary without a usage note such as "nonstandard" or "dialectal" or "regional," then it is considered by the editors of that dictionary to be as standard as any other spelling of the same word.
In the case of "zeros"/"zeroes," the *Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary* ( www.m-w.com ) shows the plural forms as "plural zeros also zeroes." According to the rules used at that dictionary, this means that both spellings are indeed equally standard, but "zeroes" is less common a variant than is "zeros," so that "zeroes" would be what the M-W editors refer to as a "secondary variant." If it had been used just about as often as is "zeros," then that would have been indicated by using the word "or": "plural zeros or zeroes."
(In the above, I have decided not to represent the boldface type and italics which were originally in the dictionary entry.)

Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
E-mail: mplsray @ yahoo . com

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[nq:2]Zero is an oddball when it comes to spelling.[/nq]
[nq:1]Webster's New Encyclopedic Dictionary, BD&L 1993, lists zero, pl zeros also zeroes salvo, pl salvos or salvoes solo, pl solos ... -noes or -nos I can only conclude that words ending in -o are oddballs when it comes to spelling.

[/nq]
)
[nq:1]Google web has zeros beat zeroes 2:1 (4:1 if limited to English pages), whilst google Usenet has it pretty much 1:1.[/nq]
Great, I do like belonging to yet another minority

The final consonant rule rings a bell, unfortunately I can't remember what I (could of*) learnt concerning final 'o' (I'm pretty sure there was something...). Maybe I should have paid more attention to such boring stuff in school. No way I would have imagined I'd ever try to recall English grammar rules once seen in 6(?)th grade hehe.

Thanks for all your replies,
Malte
*) SCNR after reading the "loose" thread

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]Webster's New Encyclopedic Dictionary, BD&L 1993, lists zero, pl zeros also zeroes salvo, pl salvos or salvoes solo, pl solos ... -noes or -nos I can only conclude that words ending in -o are oddballs when it comes to spelling.

[/nq]
Do they give alternatives to "potatoes" or "tomatoes" or "rhinos"? (I doubt they would.) Do they show both possibilities for "albino(e)s", "mulatto(e)s", and "mosquito(e)s"?
At any rate "zero(e)s" is certainly not unique! FWIW I include the E.

Odysseus

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[nq:1]Webster's New Encyclopedic Dictionary, BD&L 1993, lists zero, pl zeros also zeroes salvo, pl salvos or salvoes solo, pl solos ... zeros beat zeroes 2:1 (4:1 if limited to English pages), whilst google Usenet has it pretty much 1:1. Cheers Michael[/nq]
Comes to think of it,
tomato (sing.) / tomatoes & tomatos (pl.)
potato (sing.) / potatos & potatoes (pl.)
and
potatoe (singular underhanded trick of lefty school teachers on Veeps, who the press will blame rather than the trick player) / 'taters (pl.)

Indeed, it would seem plenty of -o ending words violate what my sainted grade school teacher told me "-es only after ". I'll bet the class gerbil didn't "go to live with a nice farm family" either!

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Go<br/>No<br/>So

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So<br/>No<br/>Go

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