PluralForms

PluralForms refers to the set of word forms used to indicate more than one of something. They apply to nouns, pronouns, determiners, and sometimes adjectives, and often require agreement with verbs or other modifiers within a clause. Pluralization is a central aspect of morphology in many languages and varies widely across language families. In English, for example, a plural is usually formed by adding -s or -es, though many nouns have irregular plural forms.

Languages differ in how many plural forms they recognize. Some have only two categories, singular and plural. Others have more complex inventories, including dual (two), paucal (a few), and special plural forms used for groups or mass terms. Some languages, such as Chinese, lack grammatical plural marking, while others express plurality through particles, word order, or stem changes.

Plural forms interact with gender, case, and agreement in noun phrases, and they influence agreement of adjectives and verbs. They present challenges for language learners and for computational processing, especially in languages with rich or irregular plural systems.

In software localization and language technology, plural rules determine which form to display for a given number. PluralForms is a concept used in some frameworks to describe the mapping from numeric values to plural categories (for example zero, one, two, few, many, other). Data sets such as CLDR and implementations like ICU use these rules to select the correct string form across languages.