Sister-in-laws, sisters-in-law, or sisters-in-laws?

If you had more than one sister-in-law, how would you talk about them? Think you know? How about if you wanted to refer to more than one right of way? Would you say rights of way or rights of ways? Here are a few more plural brain-teasers:

Overall, the formation of plural nouns in English spans the spectrum of straightforward to tricky: there’s a handy guide here to the basics. Thankfully, you can pluralize many one-word nouns simply by adding a final ‘s’. On the other hand, there are some thornier cases which need more care: one of these is how to form plurals of words that entered English from other languages, about which I’ve posted before.

As you might have gathered from tackling the above mini-test, a further common area of perplexity is the pluralization of some compound nouns, that is, nouns made up of two or more existing words, of which father-in-law is an example. Such nouns can be written in three different ways:


1. As one word (called a closed compound): footstep, schoolchild, bookcase.

2. As two or more separate words (known as an open compound): table lamp,nuclear family, right of way.

3. With a hyphen or hyphens: build-up, lady-in-waiting, brain-teaser, yes-man.


As the focus here is on plurals rather than spelling, I’m not going to discuss the whys and wherefores of hyphenation versus open or closed forms. Instead, let’s look at some rules for forming the plurals of compounds. The good news is that for many such nouns, all you need do to make the plural is to think about how the final word is pluralized and follow the same rules. You can apply these rules regardless of how the compound is written.



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