the big mans a lad i have fuck all, he lets me have a kip in a field he showed me a pond
I think my favorite part is how the first three are totally comprehensible to a modern reader, and then the fourth one is just “Wait, what?” You can practically see where William the Conqueror came crashing into linguistic history like the Kool-Aid Man, hollering about French grammar and the letter Q.
Full Disclosure, I’ve failed English Three Times and I’m mostly publishing this ask so someone more qualified can answer but:
I think Octopus is greek, like Oedipus. Octopi would be the latin-style pluralization, and incorrect. Octopodes is correct but not commonly used, Octopuses is also correct and more commonly used.
Your Best Bet, I think is to email your teacher and ask how to sort out the problem of picking the right plural so you have the tools to do it right in the future. Which will 1. give you the right plural, 2. emage with your teacher in a way that makes you look really good and 3. let you pick the right plural again in the future!
Octopus is a modern English word put together from Greek roots. The plural of the Greek -pus (foot) is indeed -podes, so if you’re being excruciatingly pedantic (as I almost always am), it is Etymologically Correct. It’s also the last of the three plurals to appear in English. 😛
Octopuses is a perfectly correct English plural form of an English word.
Octopi is an abomination, a Latin plural ending on a Greek stem, but by the rules of descriptivism, is also correct English, because it is very commonly used.
So yeah, ask your teacher which one they want you to use (not which one is right, which one they prefer).
