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Comment by sourcepluck | Hacker News Reader

A. "Busses" should be "buses", I think? Or am I stepping into a holy war... Maybe it's a British vs American English thing, but a quick look says that Merriam-Webster agrees. Maybe it's a choice by the author, in which case, fair enough. If I was the author, I'd prefer knowing, anyway.

B. Super cool article! I've an old Nook somewhere being neglected which I am now moving up my list of devices to do some messing with and find a use for. Excellent stuff.

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'Buses' is probably more standard, but 'busses' as a plural noun is common enough that it's probably not worth making a fuss about. The great/terrible thing about English is that there is no central authority; if people use it, it is English.

Yeah, IMO the plural noun is "buses", while "busses" is a conjugated verb, ex:

"When the regular buses aren't running, he busses people around in the minivan."

The OED says that "busses" is an acceptable plural in American English (I haven't read the article though, so I don't know what dialect the author speaks/writes).

> You might see the plural busses, but that form is so rare that it seems like an error to many people. [...] When the word bus was new, the two plurals were in competition, but buses overtook busses in frequency in the 1930s, and today is the overwhelming choice of writers and editors.

-- https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/plural-of-bus

Went ahead and used Google Ngram viewer to show the popularity difference, with some context-words to ensure it's comparing cases where a plural noun is being used:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=the+busses%2C+...

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=multiple+busse...

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=took+buses%2C+...

Ooh nice, I didn't know that Ngram tool! I've heard references to word frequency but didn't know where to do it. Thanks for jumping in with a bit of analysis.

Of course, if USA-based anglophones want to continue using a particular spelling or pronunciation, we know we don't have the power to stop them. I bow out of this one.

In this case, we really, really don’t want to continue using “busses” as a plural noun. Merriam-Webster is the authority. We’d rather fight our holy war over labor and center.

The buses spelling looks to me like it should rhyme with fuses. Busses has the virtue of not... doing that.

Ehh... Cough, tough, bough, lough, slough, and rough called, they wanted to know when English phonology became logical and consistent, and why no one informed them about it?

Rough and cough have different sounds so... buses is the winner? Not seeing the connection.

-ough notoriously has anywhere between four and twelve different pronunciations (if you count strange example with a limited number of words, like hiccough for hiccup).

The point I believe the parent post is making is that you cannot assume that buses would rhyme with fuses, because English orthography is so inconsistent.

Which is partially true - I haven’t seen any research to the effect, but I’d guess you can still predict the pronunciation of an English word with better than a fifty percent chance of success.

Sorry, I thought it'd be obvious that all those -ough words have different pronunciations (for most people, anyway, I think) and that I'd be making my point clearly and lightheartedly. I was just saying that English spelling isn't always "guessable", or how you think it logically should be. [Even though it may well be guessable the majority of the time, as another responder points out, for some reason].

The fact you think "busses" is a preferable spelling to "buses" because it might help you pronounce "buses" differently to "fuses" is only relevant to you yourself. I would have thought this was tautological, myself.

In summary, we could avoid all these fusses with a bit of effort to adhere to accepted usage.

I sympathizzze he-ugely with what you're saying, as "busses" looks very strange to me, I admit.

"Buss" is an archaic word for a kiss, so "busses" looks like a verb straight outta Shakespeare to me!

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