Is Prii the right word?

[a priori]

Originally Posted by JimboK

Discussed in this thread.

As Jim said: Nullum est iam dictum quod non dictum sit prius - Nothing is said that hasn't been said before. (Terence)

Yes, "prius" is a Latin word, but it is not used in its Latin form. I'm hardly a Latin scholar, but it seems to me that the word prius is an adverb and not a noun. So, Prius (as in the car) is not a noun derived from Latin. Instead, it is a 20th century adaptation of a Latin word, not a derivation of the same. The only purpose for all of this is to say that there really is hardly a way (except in English!) to take an adverb and make a noun of it. I'll bow to the Latin professor noted above who has come up with some more appropriate ways to express a plural of Prius in Latin form.

I guess we just opt for our own preferences. I'll go with Priuses.

[TonyPSchaefer]

I personally prefer the following:

• Singular Noun: One Prius
• Plural Noun: Two Prii
• Collective Noun: A smug of Prii

[hyo silver]

A smug or pride sounds more like the Priusers drivin' all them Prissies.

[firepa63]

As Prius is a noun of "U-declination", the plural is just PRIUS.

[madler]

Originally Posted by patsparks

You mispronounce aluminium because you left an I out.

Well, actually it started as Aluminum by the scientist who was first extracting the metal, but then some aloof literary guy stuck the "i" in for some indecipherable aesthetic reason:

By 1812, Davy had settled on aluminum, which, as other sources note, matches its Latin root. He wrote in the journal Chemical Philosophy: "As yet Aluminum has not been obtained in a perfectly free state." But the same year, an anonymous contributor to the Quarterly Review, a British political-literary journal, objected to aluminum and proposed the name aluminium, "for so we shall take the liberty of writing the word, in preference to aluminum, which has a less classical sound."

Unfortunately the extraneous hoity-toity syllable stuck.

The subsequent loss of that syllable in the US may have been the result of an error in an advertising brochure around 1900. However it then stuck in the US, and the American Chemical Society adopted Aluminum as the official name, with Aluminium as an acceptable variant.