Can you programmatically detect pluralizations of English words, and derive the singular form?

Question

Given some (English) word that we shall assume is a plural, is it possible to derive the singular form? I\'d like to avoid lookup/dictionary tables if possi

Answer 1

Going from singular to plural, English plural form is actually pretty regular compared to some other European languages I have a passing familiarity with. In German for example, working out the plural form is really complicated (eg Land -> Länder). I think there are roughly 20-30 exceptions and the rest follow a fairly simple ruleset:

• -y -> -ies (family -> families)
• -us -> -i (cactus -> cacti)
• -s -> -ses (loss -> losses)
• otherwise add -s

That being said, plural to singular form becomes that much harder because the reverse cases have ambiguities. For example:

• pies: is it py or pie?
• ski: is it singular or plural for 'skus'?
• molasses: is it singular or plural for 'molasse' or 'molass'?

So it can be done but you're going to have a much larger list of exceptions and you're going to have to store a lot of false positives (ie things that appear plural but aren't).