NiKKoM said:
Shouldn't it be penises...? I haven't been around many of them so I never had to use it plural.. maybe an expert can help us out |
Perhaps I should explain.
When someone says the plural of "penis" is "peni", they're trying to imitate Latin. But in Latin, the "i" ending is used for plurals of words ending with "us", like "radius" or "cactus". The correct latin plural for "penis" is "penes", just like the plural of "thesis" is "theses", the plural of "crisis" is "crises", or the plural of "axis" is "axes".
It's actually a little more complex than that, since plurals in latin depend on case - it could be penes, penium, or penibus. "Peni" is the dative singular, meaning that you'd use it (in latin) as the target of a noun - like "He gave head to the peni" (although you wouldn't actually do that in English, since we don't follow the latin declension system).
Of course, in English, we don't always follow latin plurals for words of latin origin, and so you're right, we would generally use "penises", because the only words ending in "is" that we've kept the latin plurals for are the ones that end in "sis" (axis sounds like aksis, so it's kind of a special case). But if we were going to us a latin plural, it would be "penes" (pronounced pee-knees), not "peni".
