The Underscore Archives

On 14/03/07, Steve Roome <steve at pepcross.com> wrote:
> My bad, although I think there's more latin users alive now than at
> any time before so if we want to use virii we should. We certainly
> shouldn't stop because Tom Christiansen says so and some geek wannabe
> has to post about it on wikipedia. For all we know Tom has never
> studied latin, and probably neither has the geek that wrote the
> wikipedia page.
>
> According to google (perhaps a fairer ranking of word use):
>
> Results 1 - 10 of about 694,000 for virii. (0.15 seconds)
> Results 1 - 10 of about 50,100,000 for viruses
>
> So, viruses is about 70 times more popular, but virii does appear to
> be in "quite common" usage as well and certainly has a known meaning.

But the plural "virii" would suggest that the singular was "virius",
not "virus". Viri already means "men". Tom Christiansen talks sense,
y'know.

Tim