properly) writes it chintz.  Johnson cites Pope as speaking of “a charming chints,” and I have somewhere seen the plural formed by adding es.  “Of the Construction of single Words, or Serieses of Words.”—­Ward’s Gram., p. 114.  Walker, in his Elements of Elocution, makes frequent use of the word “serieses,” and of the phrase “series of serieses.”  But most writers, I suppose, would doubt the propriety of this practice; because, in Latin, all nouns of the fifth declension, such as caries, congeries, series, species, superficies, make their nominative and vocative cases alike in both numbers.  This, however, is no rule for writing English.  Dr. Blair has used the word species in a plural sense; though I think he ought rather to have preferred the regular English word kinds:  “The higher species of poetry seldom admit it.”—­Rhet., p. 403. Specie, meaning hard money, though derived or corrupted from species, is not the singular of that word; nor has it any occasion for a plural form, because we never speak of a specie.  The plural of gallows, according to Dr. Webster, is gallowses; nor is that form without other authority, though some say, gallows is of both numbers and not to be varied:  “Gallowses were occasionally put in order by the side of my windows.”—­Leigh Hunt’s Byron, p. 369.

   “Who would not guess there might be hopes,
    The fear of gallowses and ropes,
    Before their eyes, might reconcile
    Their animosities a while?”—­Hudibras, p. 90.

OBS. 28.—­Though the plural number is generally derived from the singular, and of course must as generally imply its existence, we have examples, and those not a few, in which the case is otherwise.  Some nouns, because they signify such things as nature or art has made plural or double; some, because they have been formed from other parts of speech by means of the plural ending which belongs to nouns; and some, because they are compounds in which a plural word is principal, and put last, are commonly used in the plural number only, and have, in strict propriety, no singular.  Though these three classes of plurals may not be perfectly separable, I shall endeavour to exhibit them in the order of this explanation.

1.  Plurals in meaning and form:  analects, annals,[144] archives, ashes, assets, billiards, bowels, breeches, calends, cates, chops, clothes, compasses, crants, eaves, embers, estovers, forceps, giblets, goggles, greaves, hards or hurds, hemorrhoids, ides, matins, nippers, nones, obsequies, orgies,[145] piles, pincers or pinchers, pliers, reins, scissors, shears, skittles, snuffers, spectacles, teens, tongs, trowsers, tweezers, umbles, vespers, victuals.