Plural Of Roof And Hoof

Hoofs is a much older rendering of the plural form of hoof.

Plural of roof and hoof.

The plural form of hoof is hoofs or hooves. Should it become rooves like hooves. Dwarf dwarves elf elves hoof hooves roof rooves. But then at some point in the 80 s after i had moved to the west coast people were looking at me funny when i did that and my writing was corrected to roofs rooves still sounds right but now it looks weird.

I was taught rooves in grade school on the east coast. When at school i was taught that the plural of roof is rooves and the plural of hoof is hooves. And this is how you get hoofs. Poof and poofs follow the same rule.

For example roof chef and others these do not apply the previous rule but simply add the s normally at the end of the word after f in order to obtain the plural form. Just like roof hoof also started with two plural forms hoofs and hooves. English pluralization can be complicated. For a good 250 years hoofs was the primary plural form of hoof analogized with the word roof which has roofs as a plural form.

But at the same time there are several exceptions form this rule. The plural of hof is hofas which when pronounced would have sounded like hooves. And just like roof hoofs was the dominant one. Not all nouns follow simple rules when transitioning from single to plural form.

Maybe my teachers were wrong. Hoof comes from the old english word hof. This is exactly how hooves is obtained as the first plural of the noun. Hoof for instance becomes hooves in the plural.

Hoofs is also a plural form of hoof the horny part of an animal s foot. On the other hand spoof simply adds the plural s suffix to become spoofs.