The OED is letting me down!

[evilgeniuslady]

What is the plural of fetus? Feti? Fetii? Fetuses? Or is fetus actually plural in itself?

(God, that word starts looking weird when repeated so often.)

Comments

[evilgeniuslady]

Thanks! :)

(See, I thought it was foetuses too, until the OED told me differently - and I would have assumed that a dictionary with Oxford in its title was British???)

[lady_t_220]

Revised spellings in scientific terms are annotingly common- sulphur became sulfur within the last decade or so just to unify the spellings across Global versions of English. The scientific community gets twitchy when there's different ways of spellingthe same thing. They like their universal terminolgy.

[evilgeniuslady]

Ahhh. In other words, since I'm writing a scientific paper I should just go with the OED spelling. I am so going to have to have the entire thing sent to a professional spell-checker/editor when I'm done.