Plural?

[rhino]

Hi,

A word that could have been made from yesterday's Standard puzzle - leaves. While the argument could be made that this word should not be allowed because it is just adding an 's' to 'leave', it is also the plural of 'leaf', i.e. a perfectly valid word.

Happy pondering ... I'll leave you to it!

Rhino

[les303]

I'll leave this one alone

[ridethetalk]

Cat, meet pigeon...   

[mkenuk]

The pigeons fight back.

I think leaves should be allowed as a common word.
I think all such irregular plurals should be allowed, regardless of whether there is a 'clash' with another word.

I believe that halves (two equal parts of something) is a common word in Chi.
However halves is also the third-person singular form of the verb to halve (to cut or divide something in two equal parts )

The argument is that in this particular case the noun is 'more common' than the verb, but it seems to me that this might be considered a bit arbitrary.

[jancsika]

There was one such case where I entered "impresses" and I was somewhat surprised to see it was not accepted. I subsequently learned that there is an archaic word "impresse" whose plural is also "impresses". In this case where one word us "common " and the other is "rare" then it isn't really so arbitrary....

[mkenuk]

Indeed; I was one of those who missed out on impresses;
The only dictionary that I could see with impresse was Wiktionary, which labels it 'obsolete'. Obsolete!! It's not even a 'real' word any more! It should probably be removed from the Chi lexicon completely, but I seem to remember Alan saying at one time that this is very difficult to do.
We can just hope that impresses doesn't appear very often.

Anyway, I stand by my suggestion that irregular plurals such as leaves should be allowed.
impresses is not an irregular plural - it's a perfectly regular inflected verb.