{"id":12139,"date":"2009-05-28T08:35:30","date_gmt":"2009-05-28T15:35:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/neology\/2009\/05\/28\/virii.html"},"modified":"2009-05-28T08:35:30","modified_gmt":"2009-05-28T15:35:30","slug":"virii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2009\/05\/28\/virii\/","title":{"rendered":"virii"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I occasionally see people use \"virii\" as the plural of \"virus,\" but there's no good reason (that I know of) to do so.<\/p>\n<p>See Wikipedia's entry on the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Plural_of_virus#Virus\">plural of virus<\/a> for details. Excerpts:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The plural of virus is viruses. In reference to a computer virus, the plural is often believed to be virii or, less commonly, viri, but both forms are neologistic folk etymology and no major dictionary recognizes them as alternative forms.<\/p>\n<p>[...]<\/p>\n<p>Virus comes to English from Latin. The Latin word v\u012brus [...] means \"poison; venom\", denoting the venom of a snake. [...] Since v\u012brus in antiquity denoted something uncountable, it was a mass noun. Mass nouns&mdash;such as air, rice, and helpfulness in English&mdash;pluralize only under special circumstances, hence the non-existence of plural forms [of v\u012brus] in the texts.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I occasionally see people use &#8220;virii&#8221; as the plural of &#8220;virus,&#8221; but there&#8217;s no good reason (that I know of) to do so. See Wikipedia&#8217;s entry on the plural of&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[83],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-specific-words"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}