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Where does the practice of using -a and -i for plural forms of -um and -us, respectively, come from?

  • Bacteria vs. bacterium
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These words have these plurals because they are loan words from Latin. Words that come from Latin that end in -um usually have plurals in -a, while those that end in -us have plurals in -i. This way of forming plurals is normal in Latin, and learned English preserves the native Latin plurals.

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    Key word: "usually." Some words that end in -us that are from Latin might have plurals in -i or -us, depending on the declension.
    – John Calsbeek
    Feb 4, 2011 at 23:15
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    Circus and campus are good examples of Latin words that have regular English plural forms.
    – Kosmonaut
    Apr 13, 2011 at 22:14
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    octopus and platypus are from greek. Plurals are octopodes and platypodes.
    – Michael Brown
    Dec 2, 2011 at 15:17
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    Beware the 3ʳᵈ declension: corpus > corpora, genus > genera, opus > opera, tempus > tempora
    – tchrist ♦
    Mar 18, 2012 at 4:36
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    @Chan-HoSuh That doesn’t make sense. You might as well pluralize corpus > *corpi, genus > *geni, opus > *opi then — which is nonsense. What’s O tempi O morrises then? A lament concerning morris dancers who can’t keep good time? :)
    – tchrist ♦
    Aug 18, 2012 at 3:34
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It comes from people who still remember that a word is a loan word and the lending language was inflected. Often people attempting to inflect the way Latin does do a poor job of it, so outside of the most common Latinisms, it would be better style to use ordinary plurals.

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These words are loan words from Latin. The plurals associated with words ending in -um or -us are not dictated by practice, but by precise, Latin, rules.

In Latin - which is an inflected language - there are 5 declensions. Nouns are distributed among declensions and follow declension-specific rules.

So, a noun belonging to the second declension and ending in -us (such as lupus), will have lupi as plural, while one belonging to the same declension and ending in -um will have an -a plural (bellum -> bella).

Note that in Latin nouns have a gender, so lupus is male, while bellum is neuter.

A noun belonging to the fourth declension such as spiritus (male) will have spiritus as plural.

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    I wouldn't say the plurals are dictated by precise rules. On the contrary, I would say they are dictated by inconsistently applied rules that were, at some stage, informed by Latin pluralization. We have Latin words that have regular English plurals (campus pluralizes as campuses), Latinesque plurals for words people think are Latin that aren't, like octopus-octopi (octopus is Greek), words that were originally plural in Latin that are now mass nouns (data), and words where the Latin plural form is often used for singular and plural (alumni).
    – Kosmonaut
    Apr 13, 2011 at 22:19
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    @Kosmonaut -- just my opinion, but anyone who uses "alumni" as a singular should be shot into space...
    – Michael Lorton
    Apr 13, 2011 at 23:38
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    @Malvolio If you want to extend that to Italian, anyone who uses panini as a singular word should be shot.
    – Roberto Aloi
    Apr 14, 2011 at 14:07
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    people say "a panini"? OK, I've never heard that but yes, anyone saying it will be condemned to live on Wonder Bread and yellow mustard for the rest of his life. How do people feel about 'an agenda'?
    – Michael Lorton
    Apr 14, 2011 at 14:31
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    @RobertoAloi, even in Latin, the rules are far from precise—they are, in fact, full of inconsistencies and irregularities. And as Kosmonaut said, there are plenty of words in English that are taken directly from Latin, but are not declined as in Latin. You even mentioned one of them in your answer: ‘lupus’, whose plural, though rare, is ‘lupuses’.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Sep 8, 2013 at 12:08

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