Why is it attorneys general and not attorney generals?
In: Other
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.
Latest Answers