in reply to Re: Re: Re: The plural of "athlete's foot" is...
in thread The plural of "athlete's foot" is...
Since "athlete's foot" is a mass noun, it was questionable whether it even had a plural. But, on page 61 of A Concise Grammar of Contemporary English by Quirk and Greenbaum, it says "Virtually all non-count nouns can be treated as count nouns when used in classificatory senses:
There are several French wines available (= kinds of wine)
If it's a count noun, it has a plural. I mistakenly thought that since it was a compound noun, the plural would be formed like "${noun}s" or "${noun}es". But according to this page, it appears that "athlete's foot" undergoes regular plural inflection and thus the rightmost word would become plural. According to this logic, "athlete's foot" does have a plural and that plural is "athlete's feet".
That, and googling "athelete's feet" returns about 80x the results of "athlete's foots" ;)
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