5

When we create new words ending in -ex (mutex being short for mutual exclusion), should we (may we?) use the Latin plural form because the suffix is similar to the latin suffix -ex?

(Personally I've always favoured the -ices form.)

Thursagen
  • 41,919
Engineer
  • 431

1 Answers1

7

As you say mutex comes from mutual exclusion, which is, obviously, not Latin origin; emulating Latin etymology is therefore a case of introducing unnecessary complexity.

EDIT(2): As noted in the comment by RegDwight, when you create new words, you can do almost anything you want with them. Mutex is relatively new term and it is not in any dictionaries, so prescriptivists, for example, could not rule your ?mutices as ungrammatical.

However as words are added to dictionaries according to usage, and usage shows that mutexes is commonly used1 as plural it will most likely remain mutexes when it is added to dictionaries.

1 See ngrams - there are no ?mutices, but many mutexes in the indexed corpus. Also take a look at a related discussion on stackoverflow.

Community
  • 1
Unreason
  • 12,446
  • 2
    Perhaps my question should be, "Who favours archaic forms?" – Engineer Aug 10 '11 at 11:25
  • 3
    @Nick Wiggill, it is not an archaic form; for example if you take a Greek word and make it plural according to Latin grammar rules, that is not archaic form; if you take an English word which etymologically comes from English words and use Latin rules to create plural, that is not archaic (at best it could be pseudoarchaic). Other than that - how could we possibly know who favors archaic forms? – Unreason Aug 10 '11 at 11:42
  • Touché. You can see why I am a noob here. – Engineer Aug 10 '11 at 11:45
  • Is this a 'no', then? I don't see a yes or a no, or any substantial answer... – Grant Thomas Aug 10 '11 at 12:02
  • @Mr. Disappointment, edited the answer - still it is not explicit yes or no (nor it can be), but I hope I address the OP's question more substantially now. – Unreason Aug 10 '11 at 12:19
  • 2
    The key here is that people already say mutexes and nobody (to my knowledge) says muticies. I know I wouldn't have understood you if you said it to me, and I'm a programmer and use mutexes from time to time. – Mr. Shiny and New 安宇 Aug 10 '11 at 12:35
  • Dictionaries already say "appendixes" is just as good (or better) than "appendices". So probably even if you start with "mutices" it will soon change to "mutexes" anyway. Now, mathematicians are still saying "matrices" even though the rest of the English-speaking world uses "matrixes" more and more. – GEdgar Aug 10 '11 at 14:42
  • @GEdgar, 1) see http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=matrixes%2C+matrices&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 regarding matrixes vs matrices 2) comparing an old word "matrix" with new one does not work 3) he can not start "mutices", "mutexes" is already dominant – Unreason Aug 10 '11 at 14:50
  • Funny one. Being mathematically trained indices was always preferred to the alternative,- but after reading lots of programming blurbs it's now indexes. Yecch! But if the rules now say no more -ices lets put them all on ... ice! – Laurie Stearn Aug 10 '17 at 18:25