singularize

Singularize is the process of converting a word in its plural form to its corresponding singular form. It is the opposite of pluralize, and it is commonly used in linguistics, natural language processing, and software that handles human language. In practice, singularization is often implemented as a transformation that reduces a noun to its base or dictionary form.

In English, singularization relies on a combination of rule-based changes and memory of irregular forms. Simple cases typically remove a plural marker, such as converting "cats" to "cat" or "buses" to "bus." However, many words require special handling, for example turning "geese" into "goose," "mice" into "mouse," or "children" into "child." Some nouns have the same form in singular and plural, such as "species" and "series." Irregular and uninflected plural forms pose additional challenges, as do words that end in consonants or letters that trigger spelling changes (for instance, "bush" vs "bushes," where the singular is "bush" and the plural is "bushes").

In software, singularization is provided by inflection utilities and libraries. For example, Ruby on Rails includes ActiveSupport's inflector methods to singularize words, turning "cars" into "car" and "geese" into "goose." Other languages and libraries offer similar functionality, often with rule sets and dictionaries to handle both regular and irregular forms. Singularization is frequently used in search indexing, data normalization, and natural language generation to ensure consistent, singular noun representations.