Why is it attorneys general and not attorney generals?
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Hi /u/OccamsComb!
The word “attorney general” consist of a noun – attorney – and an adjective modifying said noun – general.
In some languages, modifying a noun requires the speaker to modify the attached adjective as well.
For example, a ~~blue~~ red book would be *un livre rouge* in French. If we take the plural in English, we get ~~blue~~ red books, while in French we get *les livres rouge***s**.
As you may notice, both the noun *and* the adjective get transformed into plural forms in French, while the adjective remains unchanged in English.
Applying the same logic to attorney general, we modify the noun to its plural form – attoneys – and leave the adjective unchanged –general. Putting the words back together thus yields *attorneys general*.
Because general is an adjective, the attorney general is a type of attorney not a general. Attorney generals would be like calling a basketball team a bunch of talls guy.
In “Attorney General” the word “general” is an adjective.
In English we normally put the adjective before the noun, so we’re used to pluralizing the second word in a phrase.
So we’d say “Blue boats”. not “Blues boat”.
“Attorney General” is one of those rare cases in English where we put the adjective after the noun. In fact, it’s so uncommon, it tends to be the first example in most explanations of the phenomenon. “General” in this case is not the military rank, it’s the adjective.
“Attorney” is the noun, there’s several attorneys. What kind of attorney? Attorney general, as opposed to, say, a district attorney. Putting the adjective after the noun is irregular (“weird”) in English but we still do it sometimes, especially for titles that have existed for a long time. This is one example. We do the same thing with the highest medical position in the Federal Government, the Surgeon General – “Many surgeons general have spoken about the dangers of smoking.”
It’s a compound noun and in those cases, we generally make the principal word plural.
An attorney general is an attorney, not a general. So “attorney” is the principal word, and an “s” is added to that to indicate plural form, “attorneys general.”
Take the term “daughter-in-law”, another compound noun. “Daughter” is the principal word. If you have two relatives, they are daughters-in-law, not daughter-in-laws.
More info here: [https://www.myenglishpages.com/grammar-lesson-plural-compound-nouns/](https://www.myenglishpages.com/grammar-lesson-plural-compound-nouns/)
It’s because in “Attorney General”, the word general modifies the word attorney, not the other way around. It’s like an adjective, i.e. the attorneys in this case are general, they are not generals who are also attorneys. This is just like the more common example of passerby, the plural of which is passers-by, because you can certainly have multiple passers, but it doesn’t make sense to have to have multiple “bys” for a single passer. Conversely, you wouldn’t have Primes Minister, it’s Prime Ministers, because in that case it’s the minister who is “prime”.
Unfortunately, English doesn’t provide a simple syntactic way of figuring out what to do with these double-word phrases when they’re ambiguous like in Attorney General, but hopefully you can see how in many cases you can tell which word is “really the noun” and which one modifies it.
Because in 1200s England, speaking French was the cool thing to do!
In English we tend to put adjectives before nouns. You would say “cold day”, not “day cold”. We have some fun, instinctive rules for the ordering of adjectives as well, e.g. “big red dog” not “red big dog”, but that is less important here.
English is a fairly lazy language, so words don’t change much when you change what they are doing in a sentence. When you make a term plural you only change the noun, not the adjective; so “cold day” goes to “cold days” not “colds days” as some other languages would do. Instead of modifying the words, we express that change in meaning by using word order – word order is really important in English.
Some languages have different rules for ordering their words. In some word ordering doesn’t matter as much, if at all (Latin, for example, has some rough rules for word ordering but can change them up for emphasis).
Anyway. In French, adjectives tend to come after nouns, not before. A “cold day” in French would be something like “jour froid” (where “jour” is the day, and “froid” is the cold part). Make that plural (“cold days”) and you get “jours froids” – French adds the s to both words. There are some exceptions to this; for example, “big red dog” would translate to “gros chien rouge” – the “big” goes before the “dog” part, but the “red” part goes after. This is the kind of thing that native speakers of French would know instinctively, but people learning the language might have to practice.
Back in the 1200s French was the language of the elites in England. The ruling classes spoke French, it was the language of law courts, universities, and polite society – a way of separating the elites from the commoners. Which means a bunch of legal and technical terms were also in French. So when this new role was being formed, the French term was adopted; “attorney general” (the French would have been something like “atorné général”). But because it is French the words are in the wrong order for English. Which means when we make it plural it looks like the wrong word gets made plural. “Attorneys general” are attorneys who have a general function, rather than generals who are attorney…ish.
There are a few other words like this – court martial, notary public, secretary general, surgeon general – all technical words adopted into legal English from Normal French in the Middle Ages, and which have stuck.
If you want to go even deeper – one of the consequences of this “upper classes using French” thing is that English has a lot of duplicate words, where there is a “Middle English” version of the word and a French version. For example, why we have the term “lawyer” as well as “attorney” – the former comes from Middle English, the latter from French.
Because there are multiple attorneys, all of which are the general kind. We pluralize the attorney part, because it is the noun.
This seemingly odd pattern exists because we sometimes usually the adjective before the noun, but sometimes it comes after. In cases where the adjective comes first, it seems obvious:
* Blue pearls
* Cheese burgers
* Hot potatoes
* Colonel Sanders
In each of these, the noun — the person, place, or thing — comes after the adjective. But in some cases the adjective comes after the noun:
* Whoppers Junior
* Attorneys general
* Rights-of-way
* Mothers-in-law
The term “Attorney General” is a compound noun where “Attorney” is the noun and “General” is the adjective. When pluralizing compound nouns, you make the main noun plural, not the adjective. So, “attorneys general” makes “attorneys” plural while “general” stays the same. This rule keeps the legal title clear and correct.
Because they aren’t commanding armies.
In this case, the word “general” is an adjective, not a noun.
Attorneys general are top prosecutors of the jurisdiction.
Attorney Gererals would be members of the Bar with stars.
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