octavos, duodecimos, tyros.  So that even the best scholars seem to have frequently doubted which termination they ought to regard as the regular one.  The whole class includes more than one hundred words.  Some, however, are seldom used in the plural; and others, never. Wo and potato are sometimes written woe and potatoe.  This may have sprung from a notion, that such as have the e in the plural, should have it also in the singular.  But this principle has never been carried out; and, being repugnant to derivation, it probably never will be.  The only English appellatives that are established in oe, are the following fourteen:  seven monosyllables, doe, foe, roe, shoe, sloe, soe, toe; and seven longer words, rockdoe, aloe, felloe, canoe, misletoe, tiptoe, diploe.  The last is pronounced dip’-lo-e by Worcester; but Webster, Bolles, and some others, give it as a word of two syllables only.[142]

OBS. 9.—­Established exceptions ought to be enumerated and treated as exceptions; but it is impossible to remember how to write some scores of words, so nearly alike as fumadoes and grenados, stilettoes and palmettos, if they are allowed to differ in termination, as these examples do in Johnson’s Dictionary.  Nay, for lack of a rule to guide his pen, even Johnson himself could not remember the orthography of the common word mangoes well enough to copy it twice without inconsistency.  This may be seen by his example from King, under the words mango and potargo.  Since, therefore, either termination is preferable to the uncertainty which must attend a division of this class of words between the two; and since es has some claim to the preference, as being a better index to the sound; I shall make no exceptions to the principle, that common nouns ending in o preceded by a consonant take es for the plural.  Murray says, “Nouns which end in o have sometimes es added, to form the plural; as, cargo, echo, hero, negro, manifesto, potato, volcano, wo:  and sometimes only s; as, folio, nuncio, punctilio, seraglio.”—­Octavo Gram., p. 40.  This amounts to nothing, unless it is to be inferred from his examples, that others like them in form are to take s or es accordingly; and this is what I teach, though it cannot be said that Murray maintains the principle.

OBS. 10.—­Proper names of individuals, strictly used as such, have no plural.  But when several persons of the same name are spoken of, the noun becomes in some degree common, and admits of the plural form and an article; as, “The Stuarts, the Caesars.”—­W.  Allen’s Gram., p. 41.  These, however, may still be called proper nouns, in parsing; because they are only inflections, peculiarly applied, of certain names which are indisputably such.  So likewise when such nouns are used to denote character: