octopus

Octopodeez nuts

Beat me to it

Words brought into English can use English pluralisations, so you're not wrong if you say octopuses. I think Grammar Girl had a take on this maybe 7 or even 8 years ago by now. These days, I can't see myself getting worked up about it for the sheer fun of being pedantic like I used to.

Octopussy. Thank you very much.

I knew there was going to be someone as childish funny as me in here!

When a Roman family has their 16th child.

In greek it would be incorrect, in english it's not worse than the others.

Ah, i see you are a man of culture as well.

If you say ok-top-o-dees, you'd better be prepared to deliver this spiel at a moment's notice

HA! That video was really good. Extremely quick and to the point, great linguistics content, and funny to boot!

A hypercorrection based on a misunderstanding of the Latin declension for the word, at that.

Neither are incorrect, that’s the point

.. podes

Veemo!

You do have the benefit of being right though.

The word octopus is a classical Greek word that comes to English via Latin. The Greek plural is octopodes, the Latin plural is octopi. But we don't speak Latin or classical Greek. We speak English. Because octopus is the English word for octopus it follows the English rules for pluralization, which is to add "s" or "es" to the end of the word. Cases can be made why octopi and octopodes could be technically correct, but for English speakers octopuses is the most correct.

Because people use it, and if you say it everybody will understand without any ambiguity.

Octopuses is correct if you're referring to many different species of octopus. Octopi would be correct if you're referring to a cluster of one species of octopus.

The Latin origin. Words ending on -us turn almost always into -i in plural in Latin. And that's where it comes from (octo eight, pus/pes foot).

people = a group

persons = a group of individuals

Great question. When I hear people I think that’s used to draw attention to common relevant traits “people of England” for example. Persons is more a group of less related individuals or at least with less relevant similarities “persons of interest” for example

which can lead to crises of errata

I mostly write 'indexes' these days when I'm not on autopilot, in part since not all of my coworkers have a high English proficiency and just following the normal +(e)s plural makes it easier. My brain really does not want me to write 'matrixes' however (and indeed, my dictionary in this browser is fine with 'indexes' but not 'matrixes'). I also try not to be pedantic with verbs whose irregular forms have become less common than their "incorrect" (at least when I was taught) forms. "Shined" being one of these, but I am sure there are more.