The plural of gymnasium

**rajpoot** · 05-01-2011, 20:33

When has anyone ever cared about true English....half of the world speaks mutated versions of English. And the few purists who still hold to British English are often corrected when they add the 'u' in 'honour'.
Over here the people speak 'Hinglish'.
Go with gymnasiums.
Just my 2 cents.

**Hosakawa Tito** · 05-01-2011, 21:05

How do you spell it in text-speak?

**The Stranger** · 05-02-2011, 17:40

Originally Posted by india

When has anyone ever cared about true English....half of the world speaks mutated versions of English. And the few purists who still hold to British English are often corrected when they add the 'u' in 'honour'.
Over here the people speak 'Hinglish'.
Go with gymnasiums.
Just my 2 cents.

british language purists are actually undercover french aristocrat nationalists.

**a completely inoffensive name** · 05-03-2011, 10:09

http://youtu.be/R4i8SpNgzA4

**A Nerd** · 05-03-2011, 12:25

**Subotan** · 05-03-2011, 15:01

Originally Posted by a completely inoffensive name

http://youtu.be/R4i8SpNgzA4

Ah, ACIN, I see you are one of those whale-kissing, Dukakis-hugging moon-maidens.

**ajaxfetish** · 05-05-2011, 22:59

Taking a look at the numbers in the Corpus of Contemporary American, gymnasiums gets a total of 121 hits and gymnasia 19. Restricting it to only academic sources, gymnasiums gets 27 and gymnasia 13. You're certainly more likely to find gymnasia in academia than anywhere else, but even in the ivory tower that leaves a 2:1 preference for gymnasiums. It's a word used infrequently enough that I don't feel like the irregular plural has much traction. Gymnasiums sounds natural to me; gymnasia strained. I'd go with good old regularized gymnasiums.

Ajax

p.s. Google n-grams has gymnasia as more common up until about 1912, when it is surpassed by gymnasiums. It has the 2 very close in 2000, though, which doesn't mesh with the COCA results and seems unlikely to me. Not sure what to make of that.