User talk:Liamtheman4real
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Octopi
Ok, I did look it up, and saw that nothing had changed. In case you aren't aware, the word octopus comes to English from ancient Greek (ὀκτώπους), which might be transliterated as "oktopous". As such, it was in use almost as early as the formation of English itself. However, the word was generally known mostly among the few educated until much later times. And the educated of those days also knew some Latin, but did not always know those languages very well. Some of them took it to be Latin (which itself had taken the word from Greek) and mistakenly assumed it to be a second declension noun because of the ending "-us". That was their second mistake. But going boldly, they then formed the second declension plural ending "-i", making octopi. And that is how the plural descended into more widely known English for quite a while.
Meanwhile, once English speakers had hold of the word "octopus", many had no Latin or Greek, and simply followed the English conventions for plurals, yielding "octopuses". For centuries, "octopi" and "octopuses" lived side-by-side as common English, but the King's English was from the more educated, who tended to use "octopi", and thus the duality persisted.
Today, both forms are acceptable English, along with a couple of others, also derivations. Octopuses is gradually becoming the more common form, as is recognized by the experts as "common English". However, it is not recognized as the "correct" form, only as the "common" one. We can expect the time to come (maybe 50 or 100 years from now) when octopi will recede and become archaic. For now, we have both. And Concerned Ape just happened to use octopi. That still works too. Giles (talk) 17:59, 2 February 2022 (UTC)