Lexigame Community
General Category => Words => Topic started by: Morbius on April 13, 2020, 07:17:44 AM
-
Both words appeared in yesterday's Challenge puzzle. Tangoed was common, tangoes was rare. That seems anomalous to me. Shouldn't they both be classified the same?
-
It's always puzzled me. Doesn't seem to follow unless there's a special reason.
-
Agreed, since they are both inflected verb forms.
The noun plural tangos of course is not allowed.
-
Maybe it's because the third person singular really is rare.
It takes two to tango, after all!
-
Your proposal, Morbius, was that tangoed and tangoes should have the same classification, but I don't think anyone would suggest that tangoed is not common, so the issue really is whether tangoes should remain rare or be treated as common.
It seems that people mostly write the inflected verb as tangos, like the plural noun. Dictionaries give different advice on this.
I googled the quoted phrase "tangoes the night away" and got 5 results. Doing the same for "tangos the night away" got 38 results. For example, "Katy Perry Tangos the Night Away in Argentina" in the Hollywood Pipeline in 2018.
We came up against similar issues with radioes, taxies and soloes. In each case it was suggested that the verb was inflected by adding es while the plural of the noun was formed by adding just s. But it appeared that not every dictionary saw things that way, and in practice most writers leave out the e, whether using the word as a noun or a verb.
Thus I added radioes as a rare word (https://theforum.lexigame.com/index.php?topic=2480.msg53748#msg53748). On similar grounds I think tangoes can be left as a rare word.