Octopi, Octopodes, or Octopuses?

Credit: National Museum of New Zealand

If you have a friend who loves fun facts you might have been interrupted by them saying well actually the plural of Octopus is Octopodes, oc-toh-poh-des, or octo-poh-dees. The word octopus comes from the Greek and the Greek plural is octopodes.

But… is it? This piece of two second trivia is a surprisingly complex linguistical mine field and usually starts with a misunderstanding of Latin declensions. What is a declensions I hear you ask. Well give me a second to pour myself a quart of whiskey and well find out!

Today in Latin 101, declensions.

Very basically Latin didn’t use sentence structure rather a sentences meaning comes from a nouns suffix. Subject and object are both added as suffixes. There are three declensions and what suffix you use with a word is determined by which declension a word is in. This gets even more complex with plurals.

In English we pretty much have one plural S with a couple of addendums. Latin has 13.

The three declensions are

First declension Latin nouns are made plural with AE, AS, ARUM, and IS.

Second declension is made plural with I, OS, A, ORUM, and IS.

And Third declension nouns are pluralized with an ES, UM, or IBUS suffix.

That headache your developing is the headache of every school child before the 20th century.

Second declension noun plurals are what most people are familiar with, Cacti, Alumni, Syllabi. Things like that.

And where the Octopus factoid is usually wrong is when people say Octopus is Greek therefore and the Greek plural is podes. Hence octopodes.

Rather Octopus is a Greek loan word into Latin and Latin words of Greek origin were treated as third declension. Therefore, the plural should be ES. But the Pus doesn’t become puses but rather Podes… because confusing grammatical rules weren’t invented by the English.

So… is this correct? Well… it really depends on who you ask. Because believe it or not the octopus plural debate has been raging among linguists two groups of Linguists for two centuries.

In 1873 the Bradford observer wrote quote:

“But as the Octopus grew and multiplied, it became necessary to speak of him in the plural; and here a whole host of difficulties arose. Some daring spirits with little Latin and less Greek, rushed upon octopi; as for octopuses, a man would as soon think of swallowing one of the animals thus described as pronounce such a word at a respectable tea-table. In this condition of affairs, we are glad to know that a few resolute people have begun to talk about Octopods, which is, of course, the nearest English approach to the proper plural.” End quote.

The Bradford observer is taking a very pedantic view sometimes called prescriptivism. A linguistic theory that meaning is ascribed on creation and should ideally not be changed.

On the other side of the debate are the crips to the prescriptivists bloods. The Descriptivists, the hippies of the linguistic world who believe that whatever the commonly understood meaning of a word is is it’s correct meaning.

Oh yes. I am going full throttle esoteric in this episode. Just alienating all my listeners.

But this raises the question why was the plural of octopus such a contentious issue? Where does all the confusion come from? And why has this debate been raging for a full 2 centuries.

Well to answer that question we are going to jump in our time machines and journey back nearly 300 years to 1735

To meet Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus who is working studiously to finish his most influential work the Systema Natura while working as a botanist in the Netherlands.

Linnaeus had a problem. Unqwieldy poly nomial naming systems in academia at the time. Isn’t that a problem we can all relate with.

Up to this point categorizing plants and animals was done in Latin in an extremely literal, and unwieldy system called polynomial naming.

Take the Hoary Plantain plant. Today it’s Latin name is plantago media. At the time it was called:

Plantago foliis ovato-lanceolatus pubescentibus, spica cylindrica, scapo tereti.

Ol Carl being a botanist was probably exhausted writing the name of a single plant so he standardized the binomial naming system literally two names. The formal naming system we still use today for scientific naming.

Linnaeus like pretty much all academics in Europe was working in Latin.

If you’ve ever wondered why you are supposed to say Cacti instead of Cactuses. It was because Latin. Latin was used to communicate across languages. So academics used Latin plurals like the I in Cacti.

Two decades later as a now renowned botanist Linnaeus would coin and popularize the first binomial name for the Octopus. The Octopus Octopodia in 1758, today called the Octopus Vulgaris. Or common octopus.

The word quickly found its way to England where it first appeared in written English in 1758 from the philosophical transactions of the royal society of London. However the word Octopodes doesn’t.

The first recorded use of octopodes in English is in 1776 by Richard Chandler who writes "the sea-polypus… the latter called by the Greeks octopodes, from the number of its feet.”

Wait hang on… what the hell is a polypus?

Well here’s the thing. The word Octopus. Isn’t Latin. And it’s also not ancient Greek. Because the Latin and ancient Greek name for octopus was the Polypus.

When Octopus started being used is uncertain, however the first recorded use was in 1554 by French Naturalist Gullaume Rodelet who coined the term Polypus Octopus. Which would then be popularized by Linnaeus two hundred years later.

The reason the word octopus only enters English in the 18th century is because prior to that people referred to them as Polypus.

The term being more specific took off first in scientific circles then in the public both of whom pluralized it as… you guessed it. Ocotopi.

Which would become its preferred plural for the next 100 years.

So Pi or Podes?

The US of octopus was from poudus, meaning feet, deriving from Greek. Therefore, it should be considered a third declension noun. And end with an ES. Hence Octopodes.

However…It’s not until the 19th century that Octopodes even starts showing up in academic documents.

So were the people of the 18th century just dummies then?

These were people who lived and breathed Latin. And yet the Octopi Octopodes debate only starts in the mid 19th century a full 100 years after the word is introduced to English.

Well… get ready to really hate Latin. Because take a guess what the plural of Polypus is? That’s right it’s Polypi.

Despite deriving from the word poly many and pous feet. Just like octopus. It is a second declension word so its plural is an I.

So we have a word octopus, derived from ancient Greek, but invented in the renaissance, derived from a Greek suffix in a Latin word which used the suffix, of I…

Where did I put that gun?

You can start to see where the confusion arises. Scientists attempting to be more specific, to separate say cuttlefish from octopus, two many footed creatures, coin Octo- pous. 8 feet.

But with the word “many feet”. Polypus/ polypi already being common. Most people are going to assume that the same pluralized form holds in the near identical new word. Polypus, polypi, octopus, octopi.

So they did for a full century.

So… why Polypi?

Well, I… don’t know because by this point I had reached the end of my sanity and my research skills so in desperation I reached out to Elizabeth Minchin a professor of Latin at the Australian National University.

Who told me it is likely the word Polypus came from Doric Greek and Doric words are considered second declension.

Oh of course… wait what the hell is Doric Greek?

Very briefly ancient Greek can be broken into 3 key regions of Greece, East, central and West. And these can be broken further into a dozen linguistic dialects. With the three key dialects, being Doric in the west Aeolic in the center and Ionic in the east.

Doric was some of the first Greek exposed to the Roman’s and formed some of the basis of Latin. Early ancient Greek loan words into Latin, are generally treated as native latin, and hence use first and second declension rules. Hence the I ending and the word Polypi.

Except… see that just raises more question.

Because the word Octopus doesn't originate with ancient Greece.

In fact if you jumped back in the time machine and went back to 500bc and asked for some Octopodes it is likely a confused man with an cart pulled by two oxen would turn up. Because according to Henry Liddell and Robert Scott who wrote an ancient Greek dictionary in 1940 that is what the word meant at the time.

So Octopus is a word that is invented during the renaissance… using a combo of a latin word and a Greek word… except that the pus of Octopus probably comes from the pus of polypus… so it’s likely derived from what is effectively a native Latin word… not a Greek word. Which means… what does that mean…. I don’t know…

Unfortunately other experts on Latin I reached out to… didn’t know. And said it would require research…

Now despite all of this, or rather because of it it is not until the late 19th century, that prescriptivists, like the Bradford observer begin pedantically arguing that everyone around them are ignoramuses. And if you thought it was ignorami. Well it comes from a verb so haha And WHY DO WE EVEN USE LATIN AT ALL?

I think the modern Meriam Webster dictionary describes the octopodes debate best as “the belief that there is no word which cannot be improved by making it less comprehensible”

So Meriam Webster, let’s take a quick look at who you back in the octopi octopodes debate. Let’s see ocotopus, plural octopuses…

If you check all modern English dictionary. The correct listed plural will be Octopuses…

I know it’s a bit of an anti climax.

See all of this was important… 500 years ago. When people were communicating across vast language barriers, and varying grammatical forms, Latin was great for that.

But we don’t use Latin anymore. And there is no reason other than pedantic snobbery not to use English plurals when speaking English.

And luckily for students everywhere the academic world has finally started agreeing.

According to research done by the University of Pitesti in Romania. The most used plural today is you guessed it Octopuses, followed by Octopi, followed by Octopodes by a wide margin.

And this is tracking across the board. Today even the Oxford English dictionary has caved to the Descriptivist demands and uses the English suffix ES pretty much across the board. Cactuses, octopuses, and rhinoceroses are all considered perfectly correct plurals in modern English.

But many dictionaries also list both Pi and Podes as acceptable pluralisation. Though some claim Pi is what’s referred to as hyper correct.

So, the answer to the question Octopi Octopuses or Octopodes, is simply yes. All three are correct.

Despite the best efforts of the prescriptivists who may be mistaken anyway. So unless you are trying to speak academic Latin a communication form 100 years dead it is just as correct and a lot easier to use the English Suffix ES.

So the next time you are at the zoo make sure to make the rounds of the octopuses, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses and watch out for the cactuses.