Morphology Practice Test

The suffix -s/-es marks plurality. In English, adding -s (or -es in certain cases) to a noun shows that there is more than one of that noun—cats, buses, boxes. The -es form helps pronunciation after certain endings (like s, x, z, sh, ch). While there are irregular plurals that don’t use -s/-es (like man → men), for the typical, regular nouns the -s/-es suffix is the signal that there are multiple items. So the idea conveyed by the suffix is “more than one.”