grammatical number - "Mutexes" or "mutices"?



When we create new words ending in -ex (mutex being short for mutual exclusion), should we (may we?) use the Latin plural form because the suffix is similar to the latin suffix -ex?


(Personally I've always favoured the -ices form.)



Answer



As you say mutex comes from mutual exclusion, which is, obviously, not Latin origin; emulating Latin etymology is therefore a case of introducing unnecessary complexity.


EDIT(2): As noted in the comment by RegDwight, when you create new words, you can do almost anything you want with them. Mutex is relatively new term and it is not in any dictionaries, so prescriptivists, for example, could not rule your ?mutices as ungrammatical.


However as words are added to dictionaries according to usage, and usage shows that mutexes is commonly used1 as plural it will most likely remain mutexes when it is added to dictionaries.



1 See ngrams - there are no ?mutices, but many mutexes in the indexed corpus. Also take a look at a related discussion on stackoverflow.


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