I hadn’t known it myself until recently — back in the day, you just had to win the semi-finals and then the finals — 8 wins. Now it’s 16.
But the plural of octopus is not octopi — it’s octopodes.
My grammar stands corrected, but I warn you - this could be a full time job.
Spell-check thinks it’s “octopuses.”
>> But the plural of octopus is not octopi — it’s octopodes. <<
No less than “Ask Oxford” agrees with you, but the Oxford dictionary is, of course, British, and the dictionary itself (as opposed to the advice-column formatted website) states all three plural forms - octopodes, octopi, and octopuses - to be valid.
Further, the argument made by “Ask Oxford” is invalid. “Octopus” does not come to us as a Greek word, but as a biological term for the animal’s genus, which is derived from the Latin word which is based on the Greek word. It is certainly standard to pluralize a Latin name for a genus by changing “us” to “i,” although this is not an absolute rule: the plural of “genus” is “genera.”
Dictionary.com Unabridged
oc·to·pus
noun, plural -pus·es, -pi
1. any octopod of the genus Octopus, having a soft, oval body and eight sucker-bearing arms, living mostly at the bottom of the sea.
2. something likened to an octopus, as an organization with many forms of far-reaching influence or control.
[Origin: 1750–60; < NL < Gk oktpous (pl. oktpodes) eight-footed; see octo-, -pod