Pluralizable

Pluralizable is an adjective used to describe a word or lexeme that can take a plural form. In linguistic terms, a word is pluralizable if a plural inflection is available in a given language, allowing it to refer to more than one entity. The notion helps explain how languages mark quantity and how phrases adjust to grammatical number.

In English, most count nouns are pluralizable by adding a suffix such as -s or -es, though many change their stem in irregular ways (man → men, child → children, foot → feet). Some words are otherwise not normally pluralized in everyday usage: information, furniture, and equipment function as mass nouns and typically appear only in the singular. Others have identical singular and plural forms, such as sheep, species, and deer. The pluralizability of a given noun can also be influenced by context and sense; data is often treated as plural in technical writing but commonly as a mass noun in everyday language.

Across languages, pluralization systems vary widely. Some languages require explicit plural marking on adjectives and determiners, while others rely on word order or counting numerals. Some languages have no productive morphology for plural at all, using different strategies to express plurality.

In linguistics and language technology, pluralizable words are tracked in lexicons and used by algorithms for parsing, generation, and translation. Pluralization libraries encode regular rules and irregular exceptions to determine appropriate plural forms for a given word and language.