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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

Some interesting comments about the plural of die, apparently all three forms are commonly used (die, dies, dice)

Linguistic drift IMHO. Formally, "dice" is the plural of "die". Less formally, "dice" are cubes with numbers on them and "die" is a completely separate word.

I’ve heard “dice” for singles: you’ll need to roll one dice here.

I never asked, but I want to believe their internal representation of “1D6” is one-dice-six.

Sorta like reading “1 x 6” as “one _times_ six” instead of “one _time_ six”

Words are fun.

In all my years in publishing, I've never heard anyone refer to jacket/spine stamping dies as dice.

> Heard

Don't they sound the same?

Funnily enough, I would argue that dice and dies sound different, phonetically:

dies daɪz

dice daɪs

To me the i sound is shorter for dice versus dies

Not in an email. Also, no, the pronunciation is distinct. At least around here.

Prize vs price (US English)

More and more English speakers (and readers) are not native. They are more likely to use (and understand) -s plurals.

Native speakers are of course also very likely to pluralize nouns in the regular way when they don't know the irregular form. Usually, only very common nouns can sustain irregular pluralization. Perhaps dice carries on at all because it is often used both as the singular and plural.

I can't see any reason to think that native speakers are changing their patterns much because of what non-native speakers do or understand.

Yeah Languages with histories of adult learning have been argued to be morphologically simpler, less redundant, and more regular/transparent [2], [7], [28]–[30].

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Dice? That's if you're talking about rolling the dice. Is it really used for these types of "dies"?

Technically die is the singular and dice is the plural form of the cubes you roll for numbers.

Then there's the other die, as in die-cast. I think these are typically referred to as dies in the plural. I'm not sure if this terminology is still in use, it seems to have been replaced with mold.

Then the other other die, referring to the fragment of silicon inside an integrated circuit. I've seen dice used more commonly, but both forms are in active use.

It's one of those frustrating inconsistencies of the English language.

> Then there's the other die, as in die-cast. I think these are typically referred to as dies in the plural. I'm not sure if this terminology is still in use, it seems to have been replaced with mold.

I think die is still used when referring to metal stamping equipment and similar, but casting equipment is usually referred to with mold.

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