plurals question

[Tom44]

I'm curious about rules for plurals (which I think I basically understand).  I did try to search the forum, but the results with all the "......." parts just sort of confused me.  Anyway, take these three words:  Live, Life, Lives.  Lives is the plural of life and is not made by adding an s to life.  Live, meaning not dead, living, or in real time does not seem to have a plural for those meanings.  If that is correct, is lives disallowed because there is a word (live) and this different meaning (lives) just because of the adding s rule?  Somehow that doesn't seem right to me. 

Any thoughts anyone?

[Morbius]

I think it depends on whether it's a common word.  In the example you give, Tom, live (the verb) is a common word, so lives isn't allowed even though it's also an irregular plural of life.  If live were a rare word, lives would be allowed.

[mkenuk]

A further example might be the word 'wive'.
Not very well known, it is simply an older verb meaning 'marry'.
'wive' is in neither COD nor Chambers, but it is in Merriam-Webster Online and, for what it's worth,Wiktionary.

I'm not sure whether wive is allowed in Chi, but I'm pretty sure that wives is allowed as common

[Alan W]

Lives was discussed back in 2012. My conclusion was:

The question is why we don't allow lives, as the plural of life, since it isn't a word made by adding S to the base word. The problem is that, as a verb, it is made by adding S to the base word, to live.

Checking in two major corpora, the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus, I find both show the use of lives as a noun is about three times as frequent as its use as a verb. But both uses are very common - in the thousands or tens of thousands. I don't think these findings alter my initial feeling, that both uses are so common that the word should remain excluded.

That topic also discussed wives.

[Jacki]

So is wives common?

[les303]

Only if they don't have a marriage certificate

[Alan W]

So is wives common?

Yes