What's the plural of mouse??

Mice. (Seriously)

I have installed a mouse on my computer.
I install mice on computers for a living.
It may be a problem with your particular mouse.
I think it's a problem with this company's brand of mice.
 
Originally posted by Boyko
Mice. (Seriously)
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I wholeheartedly agree with Boyko, it's Mice. Mouses is sometimes used as an 'accepted false word'.

But as far as English is supposed to be used (hmmm - many different versions) it's Mice.

Mice, unless......?

;)
 
I like "meece". But then again, I read the jargon lexicon, so I like lots of words that aren't.

:)
 
The Microsoft(R) Manual of Style for Technical Publications (ed. Amanda Clark, Microsoft Press, 1995, ISBN 1-55615-939-0) says: "Avoid using the plural mice; if you need to refer to more than one mouse, use mouse devices."

While there are no words that could appropriately describe my general distaste for M$ that I could use without getting somebody's panties in a knot, they certainly are more authoritative than "I'm a professional & I'm right."

Andy Walker for Cyberwalker Media Syndicate tried to puzzle it out and posted his results here.

The case against "mice" is clearly (he he) summed up by Pinker, Kim, and Prince in a post to the LINGUIST List:
The 'computer mouse' case is unclear, beginning with the phenomenon itself. Obviously there is widespread squeamishness about 'mice' but apparently not enough to allow 'mouses' to dominate. 'Mouses' is rare in speech, and in an survey of a thick catalogue of computer mail-order ads, we found that 16 used the heading 'mice', none used 'mouses', and 6 copped out and used the singular 'mouse'. We suspect that this case (and a family of related examples) is a different, weaker phenomenon, whereby irregular plurals, since their morphological idiosyncrasies force them to be stored in memory rather than generated by rule, tend to have noncompositional semantic representations, specific to the way in which that referent usually comes in bunches, rather than compositions of the root-meaning with generic plurality -- thus `mice' may well have a collecive sense that e.g. `dogs' does not. A novel sense of an irregular noun that invites a different flavor of plurality (collective, distributive, dual, etc.) is liable to feel uncomfortable when used with the existing irregular plural form; e.g., if 'mice' refers not just to "more than one mouse" but to something connoting a swarm or infestation, it will clash somewhat with pointing devices, which are encountered one at a time. But there is no structural constraint blocking the irregularity, so the phenomenon manifests itself more as minor discomfort than outright ungrammaticality triggering regularization.
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Since there is no official body that regulates English (like the Academy Francais), there is no "real" answer to the question. You can either: 1. Just stop caring (the most popular alternative to most Americans); 2. Pick an authority you trust and stick with their version like some kind of religion; or 3. Choose the term you like best and act like you know what you're talking about, thus becoming an authority for the more timid. Personally I like "mousen" (from VAX/VAXen, UNIX box/boxen), because it makes me sound like a total geek.
 
after the post that declares m$ frowns upon the use of mice, it should be clear that the correct answer is MICE. Discussion beyond that point is ridiculous because when was the last time you saw m$ get it right?

After all, are we mice or men?:D
 
M$'s support of "mouse devices" only guarantees that "mouse devices" is the wrong choice, not that any other is correct. If we applied Ed's logic to browsers, IE would make Netscape Navigator the browser of choice.
 
In swedish mouse = "mus" , the singular form of an intimate part of the female anatomy (in english
that would be a more feline word) not sure about the plural form. "Möss" or "Musar"...
Whe have to ask the swedish academy , Sture where are you.... (remember me) :)
 
Um... why should the plural form of the word "mouse" be different according to it's meaning?

When we pluralize "tear" (as in the thing that comes from your eye), you say "tears". When we pluralize "tear" (as in a "tear in a page"), you still say "tears". Granted, they sound different, but you still pluralize them the same way.

How about "speaker"? When you pluralize it in the form of many people who are delivering speeches, you say "speakers". When referring to the object that attaches to your computer that produces sound, you still say "speakers" in the plural form. (Here's something that both relates to computers and is a word that refers to two different things but is spelled and pronounced in exactly the same way)

I think it's obvious that the plural of mouse is "mice" no matter if you are talking about a thing that attaches to a computer that allows you to give commands or the animal. Period. (Yes, f*** you M$. :p )

End of discussion. <-- notice the period
 
The plural of walkman is not walkmen, more than one Bigfoot is not Bigfeet. The plural of index (as found in the back of books) is indexes, but the plural of index (as the little numbers hung onto variables) is indecies. The only thing "obvious" is that a case can be made for all the alternatives, and there isn't any room for absolute truth in English linguistics.
 
i'm not sure if the case of mouse/mouses is analogous, but one can look at the case of the word "fish". the plural of the word fish is, as everyone knows, fish. (e.g., i saw three fish). however fishes is a perfectly acceptable word. in the previous example, if two of the fish were trout and one was a bass, there would be three fish, but only two fishes. (an example of how exact language can be, when used properly)

perhaps, if you had two single button and a three button, you would have three mice, but two mouses.

in the end, i'm not sure it matters.

j
 
I remember reading that Oxford's dictionary committee had decided that mouses was a legitimate word "when applied to computer pointing devices"

So, you could say "My AutoCAD workstation has two mouses."
 
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