Mouses?
What is the plural of mouse, as in a computer pointer device? Some people say mice, others say mouses. And still others call them computer pointer devices. It seems that nobody knows. I did a little bit of research because I thought I had read somewhere that the proper usage was mouses. It seems many poeple think that they read that somewhere, but don’t remember where.
A quick google search shows about 30,000 results of “computer mouses” and about 487,000 results of “computer mice”. So, many will argue that since mice is used so much more then we should accept that as proper. I was actually surprised at how many people said that. They basically said even though it’s probably wrong, so many people use it we should consider it right. I disagree, but then where do you draw the line? There are many “proper” words and phrases in the english langauge that came to be due to improper use hundreds of years ago.
Another popular argument is that mouses just doesn’t sound right. Well, that’s a pretty weak argument as far as I am concerned. If you tried using it for more than five minutes it wouldn’t sound wrong any more. Besides, we use houses as the plural of house instead of hice and that doesn’t sound wrong. Many other nouns ending in “ouse” are pluralized with “ice” (ex. mice, lice, etc.).
The most logical argument I found was this. A mouse is a metaphor because it is a small grey device with a tail. A metaphor wouldn’t necessarily take on the same plural form as what it represents. Also, the plural of a family with the name Rothschild isn’t “the Rothschildren”, it’s “the Rothchilds”, and the woodman family isn’t referred to as “the Woodsmen”.
I think I will continue to use mouses to refer to more than one computer mouse. As one person said it is a good way to avoid confusion between rodents and pointer devices. Incidentally, the dictionary lists both mice and mouses as the plural for computer pointer devices. In the patent application for the device, Doug Engelbart called it an “X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System”, so perhaps we should be calling them “X-Y PIDSes”?