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Lawyerlady


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DH and I were discussing the roofs we are getting.  Never had we had to know the plural of roof.  So, then the question arises, what is the plural of roof.  Seems it can be either roofs or rooves, but rooves is just uncommon.

English sucks. 

 

Rooves is not wrong per se, but extremely uncommon nowadays. Here are the stats from theCorpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus:

           COCA      BNC
roofs      2307      653
rooves        1        5

The Corpus of Historical American English has 6 cites for rooves, one from 1890, two from 1930, two from 1950, and one from 1980.

Merriam-Webster doesn't even mention rooves at all. The Collins English Dictionary mentions the pronunciation /ruːvz/, but not the spelling rooves. Finally, Wiktionary has these usage notes:

The plural rooves is uncommon and is usually considered incorrect.

So if you want to be on the safe side, I would recommend going with roofs, especially if your audience is American.



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LawyerLady

 

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It does seem like codswallop

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FNW


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I always knew it as rooves.

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Ilumine


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I had my 2nd grade teacher take off HUGE points for using FISH and FISHES correctly (fish is plural but you should use fishes when discussing multiple species in a plural sentence structure).

BOY did my mom rip her a new one.

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Lexxy


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FNW wrote:

I always knew it as rooves.

 That is what I was taught too.



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Frozen Sucks!

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Data, moose, noose

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WYSIWYG


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I've always used the "replace the f with ves" rule so, roof becomes rooves.

I do agree that English is a stupid language.

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Vette


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I know what to do_sometimes wrote:

It does seem like codswallop

 biggrin



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Lawyerlady


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It's official. We are getting two new rooves.

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