grammatical number - Plural of 'yes'


What is the plural of yes? Googling brings up many different suggestions from different sources.



  • Yesses

  • Yeses

  • Yes's

  • Yes' ?



Answer



Oxford Dictionaries.com gives yeses and yesses as accepted spellings of the plural of yes, whereas searching Cambridge Dictionaries Online for yesses does not return any results.


In the absence of agreement amongst widely accepted authorities, it's a good idea to turn to usage. A quick Google N-gram query for occurrences yeses vs. yesses in their library of books published between 1800 and 2008 suggests that, from the twentieth century onwards, yeses has been the preferred to yesses (the tool is seemingly unable to parse apostrophes); greatly so from around 1950 onwards.


If I were to use yes in its plural form, I would therefore opt for yeses. Given that there is no authoritative consensus, though, it is to a large extent a matter of preference. I imagine there is no fixed, definitive spelling because (anecdotally) it doesn't seem to be a word that is commonly used in the plural, an observation that the N-Gram results appear to support.


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