Chambers of Commerce?

Question

When referring to more than one chamber of commerce, would it be correct to say chambers of commerce?

Just got a very weird mental image of a pile of eggs topped with the remaining elements of a single mcmuffin. — Bryan Downing, Commented Oct 15, 2010 at 19:15

Community · Accepted Answer · 2022-06-22 08:16:12Z

10

My intuition is that the plural is chambers of commerce, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) backed up my intuition:

CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE   145
CHAMBERS OF COMMERCES  1
CHAMBER OF COMMERCES   0

CommunityBot

1

answered Oct 14, 2010 at 23:46

nohat

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Of course, one has much more than intuition to go on -- 'of commerce' is acting as an adjective, modifying 'chamber'. This means that 'chamber' is the thing that we pluralise (for example, we don't pluralise the adjective in 'green pasture', or we would get 'greens pasture' rather than 'green pastures').
– J D OConal
Commented Oct 15, 2010 at 0:27
1

Indeed; the same applies to, say, mothers-in-law.
– Steve Melnikoff
Commented Oct 15, 2010 at 12:34

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