Pea

Four hundred years ago, if you had a single pea in your hand, you would have called it a pease. That old form of the word can still be heard in a children’s rhyme: “Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine days old.” The reason that pease used to be the singular form of the word—and also the plural form—goes back to the word’s origin. In Latin, the singular of pea is pisum and the plural is pisa; both forms contain the letter s. When English borrowed the word from Latin more than a thousand years ago, it took only the first part of this Latin word, changed the spelling to pease, and used that form to refer to one pea or to many peas. In the seventeenth century, though, people started to assume that the s near the end of pease was the s that English uses to make nouns plural. As a result, they made the well-intentioned, but erroneous, inference that the proper singular for pease must be the shortened form, pea. From then on, this new singular form, pea, existed alongside pease, which in turn came to be used only as a plural. Later, the final e of pease was dropped from the spelling, leaving us with the plural peas to go along with the singular pea.