It is something of a platitude among native speakers of English to say that our language is a motley one. It is a West Germanic language that has taken in an enormous amount of vocabulary from non-Germanic languages, especially French, Latin, and Ancient Greek. These other languages have systems for the pluralization of nouns that differ from the predominant system in English and, in some cases, users of English have favored pluralizing nouns derived from other languages according to the morphological rules of the word’s language of origin. As a result of this and other factors, pluralizing nouns in English is sometimes a controversial subject.
One of the most controversial of all English nouns to pluralize is octopus, which ultimately derives from the Greek word ὀκτώπους (oktṓpous), which is a compound of the Greek word ὀκτώ (oktṓ), meaning “eight,” and the noun πούς (poús), meaning “foot” or “leg.” English-speakers have tried to pluralize this noun in various ways, with the most popular plural forms being octopuses and octopi. But which plural for this word is the most pedantically correct? In this post, I will delve into the wonderful and exciting world of etymology to answer this question.
Background on nouns in Ancient Greek
In Ancient Greek, every noun has a grammatical gender of masculine, feminine, or neuter. When a person wants to use a noun, they decline it (i.e., change the form) according to number and case. Number indicates whether a noun is singular or plural (or, in some rare cases, dual) and case indicates how the person is using the noun syntactically.
A total of five noun cases exist in Ancient Greek: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative. A noun may take a different form in each number and case, with the exception that, for all nouns, the vocative plural is always identical to the nominative plural across all genders and declensions. As a result of this, a single noun in Ancient Greek may have up to five different singular forms and four different plural forms: one form for each of the five different cases, minus the vocative plural.
For our purposes today, we will ignore the genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative cases and focus on the nominative, which the case that a person uses for a noun when it is the subject of a clause.
ὀκτώπους in Ancient Greek
In Ancient Greek, the most common name for the creature that English speakers know today as an octopus was actually πολύπους (polýpous), which is formed from the prefix πολυ- (poly-), which means “many,” plus the word πούς (poús), which means “foot” or “leg.” This is the word that the Greek philosopher Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BCE) uses for the creature throughout his various treatises on natural philosophy.
The word ὀκτώπους, by contrast, occurs in Greek mainly as a common adjective meaning “eight-legged” and it is not unambiguously attested as a name for the creature that English-speakers call an octopus until quite late.
The earliest attested use of the word ὀκτώπους as an adjective is in a fragment (fr. 80 Shorey) of a lost play by the Athenian comic playwright Kratinos (lived c. 519 – c. 422 BCE), which the medieval Greek scholar Photios (lived c. 810 – 893 CE) preserves through quotation in his own work (p. 326.19). The fragment reads: “ὀκτώπουν ἀνεγείρεις” (“You are stirring up an eight-legged thing!”).
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a Minoan terra-cotta vase dating to around 1500 BCE depicting an octopus, currently held in the Herakleion Archaeological Museum on Krete
Unfortunately, it is not clear whether the “eight-legged thing” that Kratinos references in this fragment is the same creature that twenty-first-century English-speakers know as an octopus, since we have no information about the fragment’s context.
It is possible that the “eight-legged thing” Kratinos references may be a crab, since later Greek writers use forms of the word ὀκτώπους to describe crabs. For instance, the Batrachomyomachia or Battle of the Frogs and the Mice, an anonymous comic mock epic poem in dactylic hexameter that was most likely written in around the late fourth century BCE, uses a plural form of the word in reference to crabs in line 298:
“ὀκτάποδες, δικάρηνοι, ἀχειρέες, οἱ δὲ καλεῦνται καρκίνοι.”
This means, in my own translation:
“They are eight-legged, two-headed, handless, and they are called crabs.”
Similarly, the Roman poet Statyllius Flaccus, who most likely flourished sometime around the beginning of the first century CE, uses the same word as an epithet to describe a crab in the following poem, which is preserved in the Greek Anthology 6.196:
“Ῥαιβοσκελῆ, δίχαλον, ἀμμοδύτορα
ὀπισθοβάμον᾿, ἀτράχηλον, ὀκτάπουν,
νήκταν, τερεμνόνωτον, ὀστρακόχροα,
τῷ Πανὶ τὸν πάγουρον ὁρμιηβόλος,
ἄγρας ἀπαρχάν, ἀντίθησι Κώπασος.”
This means, in my own translation:
“The line-fisher Kopasos dedicates to Pan
as a firstfruit of his catch the crab,
the bandy-legged, two-clawed, sand-diving,
backward-walking, neckless, eight-legged,
solid-backed, hard-skinned swimmer.”
Eventually, by late antiquity, Greek writers had begun to use the word ὀκτάπους (oktápous) to describe the creature that modern English speakers know as an octopus. The Greek medical writer Alexandros of Tralleis (lived c. 525 – c. 605 CE) uses the word with this meaning in his Twelve Books on Medicine 7.1.
ABOVE: Photograph from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website showing a Hellenistic bronze crab dating to between the third and first centuries BCE
Pluralizing ὀκτώπους in Ancient Greek
Now that we’ve examined evidence for the usage of the word ὀκτώπους in Ancient Greek, let’s talk about how one should pluralize it. ὀκτώπους declines as a third-declension masculine noun and the Greek third declension nominative plural ending for masculine and feminine nouns is -ες (-es). Based on this, someone might assume that the plural form of octopus according to Greek declension rules should be octopuses. This, however, would be incorrect.
In Greek, all noun forms other than the nominative singular are formed from the root stem, which is not always predictable from the nominative singular form. Thus, the root stem of ὀκτώπους is actually ὀκτώποδ- (oktṓpod-). To derive the nominative plural form of the noun, we must take this stem and add the third-declension masculine nominative plural ending. This gives us the marvelous, delightful plural form ὀκτώποδες (oktṓpodes).
If, therefore, a person wishes to be pedantically etymologically correct, then the plural form of the word octopus is octopodes. If we apply the standard rules for English pronunciation of Greek words, then this should be pronounced something like /ɔk.ˈtou.pɔ.dɛz/, with the third ⟨o⟩ and the final ⟨e⟩ both being pronounced as short, since they are both short vowels in Greek.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a singular octopus swimming
Where the incorrect plural form octopi comes from
The Greek diphthong ου (ou) is usually Latinized as a long ⟨ū⟩. Thus, the Greek word πούς (poús), which forms the second component of the word ὀκτώπους, becomes pūs in Latin.
In antiquity, the word ὀκτώπους was rare in Greek and consequently never entered into Latin. In 1758, however, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (lived 1707 – 1778) published the tenth edition of his work Systema Naturae or System of Nature, in which he laid out the system of binomial classification for living things. In this work, he coined the word octopus as genus name in New Latin, deriving the name from its Greek roots, possibly unaware that the word had existed in Ancient Greek.
The word octopus swiftly passed from New Latin into scientific English. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED)’s online entry for the word lists its earliest attested use in English as occurring in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London volume 50, published in 1759, on page 778 in the following quotation: “The Polypus, particularly so called, the Octopus, Preke, or Pour-contrel . . .”
Unfortunately, some confusion about the word’s morphology seems to have arisen quite early. In Latin, second-declension masculine nouns end in -us in the nominative singular and end in -ī in the nominative plural. English speakers have often continued to use the second-declension masculine nominative plural ending for Latin second-declension masculine nouns that we have imported into English. For instance, people often pluralize syllabus as syllabi, cactus as cacti, and so forth.
Despite the fact that octopus does not derive from a Latin second-declension masculine noun, the fact that the word ended in -us made it superficially look as though it did. Consequently, people began trying to pluralize it as a Latin second-declension masculine noun, inventing the plural form octopi. The OED‘s earliest citation for the plural form octopi comes from 1834 in Edward Griffith’s Cuvier’s Animal Kingdom XII. 291, with the quotation: “The octopi also feed on conchyliferous mollusca.”
ABOVE: Photograph showing a diver next to a gigantic octopus
Conclusion
How one pluralizes octopus therefore depends on how much of a pedant one wishes to be. If one does not wish to be a pedant, then the Anglicized plural octopuses is completely acceptable. If, on the other hand, one does wish to be pedant and obnoxiously show off their knowledge of classical morphology, then one can use the plural form octopodes.
I, however, will always regard the plural form octopi as categorically unacceptable because it is not a regular English plural and it is based on an incorrect assumption about the etymology of octopus. I’m not enough of an asshole to correct someone when they use the plural form octopi, but it still grates the gears of my inner pedant a little bit every time I hear it.
ABOVE: The Pedant, early nineteenth-century caricature by Thomas Rowlandson (lived 1757 – 1827), drawn in pencil, ink, and watercolor
The post What Is the Correct Plural Form of ‘Octopus’? appeared first on Tales of Times Forgotten.
