Serious debate here
Which is plural of Penis
Penises
Peni
penis'
i'm bald/ vanilla extract
@official-penis-posts
Penes. The actual answer is penes.
(You may see the word "hemipenes" floating around, especially if you are familiar with lizards)
This is because 'penis' is a Latin word, and thus uses a Latin plural.
"But 'peni' is right there. Shouldn't that be the plural then?"
No.
So Latin has 5 patterns for grammatical suffixes for its nouns (called declensions). 3 of these declensions have base singular forms that end in an '-s'.
The base second declension form ends in "-us", and its plural is the classic "-i" that everyone thinks of when they think Latin plurals.
'Penis', however, is a third declension noun, and so uses the plural suffix "-es".
(Incidentally, the fourth declension and some third declension nouns end in "-us", but have the third declension "-es" plural, sort of)
A lot of the confusion stems from 1. English vowels all simplified when not stressed, so English speakers don't vocally make the distinction between the vowel-S suffixes used in Latin (or in Greek for that matter) and 2. nobody studies Latin enough to know this except for pedants like me.
(Note 1: Using the standard English plural for stuff, even "foreign" words, is basically always correct, and it's how I voted in this instance. "Peni", however is just so fundamentally wrong as to be an affront to all sensibilities)
(Note 2: For those about to ask the question, the plural of octopus is "octopodes" or, according to my spell check, "octopods". Octopus is a Greek word, but more importantly, its main root word, "pus" or "pous", fits in a wonky category of declination, the best way of explaining i can think of being "the -d- turns into an -s when it's at the end of of a word)
@official-linguistics-post
