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Comment by dools | Hacker News Reader

Only monsters say legos. The plural of Lego is Lego.

I think it’s worse to get worked up over the use of “Legos.”

Reminds me of the quote from the guy who designed Comic Sans.

“If you love Comic Sans, you don’t know anything about typography. But if you hate Comic Sans, then you don’t know anything about typography either…and you should get another hobby.”

>>I think it’s worse to get worked up over the use of “Legos.”

Agreed! I think we should gather all such datas together and see what informations we can gather; if we present our common knowledges, and lots of lucks, I'm sure we can present convincing evidences for all the peoples to stop fussing!

<watches HN implode:>

That's not exactly right; in British English and other dialects that don't say "legos", we don't have a plural of "lego" because we treat it grammatically as a "mass noun" just like "furniture", "spaghetti" and "advice".

"Legos" sounds wrong to us not because we care about the brand identity, but for the same reason that it sounds dopey to say "I love your furnitures", "These spaghettis are tasty" or "let me give you two advices".

Huh. Wonder what kinds of forces drive the pluralization (or lack thereof) of nouns in English dialects? Your comment reminded me of another one that sounds odd to my American ears: "maths," as in "Tommy's always been very sharp at maths."

Oh yeah, Americans saying maths wrong really grinds my gears. Why use a singular? It's not short for mathamatic!

I'm surprised to read this. I'm pretty sure the norm in English is to add "s" even to proper names (like most European languages I think? but unlike French) so Legos would be logical.

In French it would depend on whether you write "des Lego" (capitalised, keeping is as a proper noun) or "des legos" (as a genericised trademark). Both are correct.

I think Lego is used in the same way as "milk". You have to arbitrarily divide it and has no natural division. You don't have some milks and you don't have some Legos. A Lego set is like a glass of milk. But sooner or later you just end up with a mess of hundreds of random pieces spread across children's lives like grains of sand. You hope they stay in the sand pit, but they will get everywhere.

Lego is the brand name, so it's more like calling two Nike store Nikes rather than Nike stores. Outside of North America it's more usual to refer to many Lego bricks as, well, Lego bricks or Lego pieces. If we're playing with a lego set etc, we'd just say that we're playing with Lego.

Yeah but remember that English is pretty irregular, so even though appending "-s" turns many words into their plural form there are many counterexamples. Like:

- one fish, two fish

- one sheep, two sheep

- one child, two children

- one mouse, two mice

- one knife, two knives

In this case many of us grew up using "lego" as the plural, so "legos" sounds to us a bit like "sheeps", "mouses" or "childs". Not a huge deal - nobody's losing any sleep over this, but it's definitely worth explaining why it sounds weird to some of us :)

Or LEGO...

Personally I tend to prefer to use the form "LEGO®" in written text. It's a little trickier in spoken word, but I find that if I append some boilerplate trademark text it sounds surprisingly natural:

"Timmy, that's the third time this week I've stood on your LEGO® in the hallway! Clean it up or we're going to confiscate it! LEGO® is a registered trademark of LEGO System A/S, DK-7190 Billund, Denmark."

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