How to Use Alumni Plural or Singular (With Examples)

Is “alumni” singular or plural?

The Latinate word alumni is the plural of alumnus. Alumnus is singular.

What’s the plural of alumnus?

Alumni is the plural. If you want to get more into it, the technical Latin plural for male graduate students is alumni. For female graduate students, the technical term is alumnae.

When referring to any or all genders (which may or may not be the case at all points in time), stick to alumni.

What’s the definition of alumnus/alumni?

Alumni (plural noun) are graduates of a former school, college, or university.

Traditionally, in Latin, alumnus (singular noun) referred to a graduate or former pupil student that is male.

Interestingly, the female-gendered counterpart of alumnus, which is alumna, meaning “female pupil or graduate of a school,” was coined nearly two centuries later in the 1860s.

Accordingly, the plural of former female graduates or students would be alumnae (though this is highly uncommon in modern usage).

Is alumnus/alumni a regular or irregular noun?

The plural and much more commonly used alumni is irregular, since it doesn’t end in the standard plural form of -s or -es. Only nouns that end in -s or -es are regular in English; all other noun endings are considered ‘irregular’, despite the fact that many exist.

What’s curious about alumni, however, is that unlike its Latinate counterparts (read: fungus, cactus, stimulus, syllabus, etc.), alumni stands as one of the few Latinate nouns that have stood the test of time in its original Latin form.

For example, funguses is now an accepted, Americanized plural of the original Latin plural, fungi. This is a speculation: likely, funguses came to be accepted over time because of frequent misuse (that or Noah Webster campaigned for it).

In the case that you didn’t know, all of us English-speaking individuals speak a little bit of Latin (and Greek, German, Dutch, Spanish, and so on). Alumnus and its plural half, alumni, are the original Latin forms of the word that have been in use since approximately the 1640s.

See the chart showing the original Latinate plural, and uses one of the distinct Latin suffixes, i.e., -i: cactus, octopus, alumnus, fungus, hippopotamus. (Some of these are not originally Latin, but nevertheless use Latin suffixes.) Each has conserved their form since its inception (or near inception) as a word/noun.

Alumnus and alumni, in application

Synonyms & nearby words

Worksheet: Latin nouns

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