About

Evo Inflector implements English pluralization algorithm based on "Damian Conway's" paper "An Algorithmic Approach to English Pluralization".

There are more or less half a million downloads of Evo Inflector from Maven Central each month. It is used by many high profile projects like Spring and JetBrains and tons of smaller projects.

Usage

The usage is pretty simple:

English.plural("word") == "words"

Additionaly you can use provide a required count to select singular or plural form automatically:

English.plural("foot", 1)) == "foot"
English.plural("foot", 2)) == "feet"

Features

The algorithm tries to preserve the capitalization of the original word, for instance:

English.plural("NightWolf") == "NightWolves"

Limitations:

• The algorithm cannot reliably detect uncountable words. It will pluralize them anyway.
• There are words which have the same singular form and multiple plural forms, ex: die (plural dies) - The cubical part of a pedestal; a plinth. die (plural dice) - An isohedral polyhedron, usually a cube

Tests

As part of the unit tests the results of the algorithm are compared with data from Wiktionary.

There are (2021-07-10) 276574 single word english nouns in the English Wiktionary of which:

• 69.26971% (191582) are countable nouns,
• 27.56839% (76247) are uncountable nouns,
• for 2.8863885% (7983) nouns plural is unknown,
• for 0.27551398% (762) nouns plural is not attested.

Evo Inflector returns correct answer for:

• 96.24286% (184384) of all countable nouns, see this report,
• but only for 8.56296% (6529) of uncountable nouns.

In overall it returns correct answer for 69.02782% (190913) of all nouns.

Changes

1.3

• fix ulum -> ula rule
• return empty string for empty string input
• improve preservation of letter capitalization
• make tests up-to-date with change in Wiktionary

1.2.2

• fix pluralization of todo

1.2

• compile with Java 1.6 for better compatibility
• -s -> -ses, for instance pancreas -> pancrases
• -ulum -> -ula, for instance baculum -> bacula
• some minor optimizations
• better testing with Wiktionary dump

1.1

• fix for -us ending words, like virus

1.0.1

• add inflection with count

1.0 Initial revision

License

Evo Inflector is available under Apache License 2.0.

Download

You can download the library from here or use the following Maven dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.atteo</groupId>
    <artifactId>evo-inflector</artifactId>
    <version>1.3</version>
</dependency>

or the Gradle dependency:

compile group: 'org.atteo', name: 'evo-inflector', version: '1.2.2'