Mouse Vs Mice

[4GS]

why are two mice so called? Why aren't they called mouses? After all two houses are called houses and not hise

[luckyju]

its like goose are geese and not gooses, and moose and more than 1 is moose and not mooses

[Quizmonster]

Actually, they have been called 'mouses' sometimes in technical situations in which some device seems to have appropriate shape/qualities. The mouse - ie a small, rounded thing with a longish tail - you use with your computer may be referred to in the plural as 'mouses'.

[Quizmonster]

There are loads of irregular or mutation plurals in English, John...we don't have tooths, foots, childs, mans, sheeps, deers etc, do we? Just another of the wonderful vagaries of English.

[jno]

Old English sometimes altered words by changing the vowels. This is still the case in quite a few verbs eg I run becomes I ran rather than I runned. With plural nouns there are just a handful: foot, tooth, goose (oo becomes ee), mouse and louse, man and woman. There are a few where the plural doesn't change at all (sheep, deer) and a few others for historical reasons - ox becomes oxen, child becomes children (that's actually a double plural: childer+en).

These are all fairly basic words, or would have been among peasants a thousand years ago, and perhaps it was regular usage that stopped them defaulting to the more usual forms in modern English. As QM says, the more modern sort of mouse is sometimes mouses in the plural.

[Ice.Maiden]

4GS just made me laugh, because I know a posh person who calls a house a hise!!! ROFL.

[brionon]

Just fancy -One Vice could be a vouse !

[weggiewabbit]

jno, you hit the nail on the head.

While the majority of English words are derived from Latin, these are all borrowed; our underlying language is Germanic (i.e. related to German and Dutch).

You can see the same sort of vowel changes in German and English verbs; for example :�

er ist = he is
er war = he was

er beginnt = he begins
er begann = he began

There are many more instances of this.