Roofs & hooves

[ChimChimeny]

Why are they different when plural??? Both the same when singular, I just don't get it.

Is there a rule telling me when to you add 's' or 'ves'?

It always used to be 'rooves' but I think it's regarded as old fashioned now.

Perhaps we'll start talking about 'knifes' and 'wifes' soon!

Rooves is correct too. I think roofs is US English

Rooves is in Webster's

www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rooves

I think 'roofs' is the norm now. The only other 'oof' words I can think of are 'spoof' and 'proof', both of which just have an s appended for the plural. Are there any other '-ooves' apart from 'hooves'?

I would have thought it was rooves,

Across the rooves,

Now both of them look wrong.

Roofs.
Rooves.

Then there's shelves, wives and elves, which are always ves

But dwarfs?! This is very confusing...

Loaf is Loaves but Oaf is Oafs .

Our language is so full of contradictions .

It is isn't it! There apparently isn't a rule, which I don't like 😆

I went to primary school a long time ago and I think I was taught 'rooves', but now I would not have any preference for roofs or rooves. I would accept either.

(If it were someone saying 'is'instead of 'are' I wouldn't be so easy-going.)

I was taught rooves at school but more commonly see roofs and only realised it is dwarfs and not dwarves when I went to Disney a few years back.

I think rooves is what I learned 60 years ago at school. Roofs is American English filtered back across the pond. Just shows English evolves though!

I started school fifty years ago and roofs was the preferred pronunciation and the only correct spelling. ‘Fowler’s Modern English Usage’ (1996) says
”The standard plural form in BrE is roofs, but the minority form rooves seems to be gaining ground.”

English is idiosyncratic.🤷🏻‍♀️

The word “rooves” sounds wrong, frankly! Even my predictive text has red-lined it.

I would say “dwarves”, though.

I dunno. In Old English roof (hrof) and hoof (hof) are the same type of noun, and pluralised in the same way (hrofas/hofas), with the f softening to a v sound in the middle, the way f did between vowels in Old English. Someone's probably studied why they turned out different in modern English…

I think hoofs was also preferred to ‘hooves’ in the first half of the twentieth century.

It's dwarves isn't it? <confused now>

Oxford dictionary online version at lexico.com used to be great for this sort thing, but they've sold out to the US and now redirect to the terrible-on-the-eyes and completely American dictionary.com

I use my online county library login to access oed.com, if that's any good to you?

As far as I know:

Dwarves is only used for the mythical mine-dwellers, who can also be dwarfs.

Referring to people with dwarfism, dwarfs is the only acceptable pluralisation, never dwarves (though I'd probably say "people with dwarfism" — I don't know whether saying "dwarfs" is considered okay, and I've never had much reason to need to refer to multiple people with dwarfism at once, so I've never really investigated…).

It's dwarves isn't it?

No, except in Middle Earth.

... probably the fault of the Elves.