This template automatically generates the plural form of any of various words, for the purpose of feeding it to other templates.

This template uses only one parameter, which is the word to be pluralized.

This template simply employs the parser function #switch to keep a list of words and their plurals. Consequently, this list should contain all the relevant words before they are pluralized elsewhere.

As an exception, if this template is used to pluralize a word not in the list, the final result is simply the word with an additional letter "s" at the end.

  • Since the objective of this template is to be used in other templates, only relevant words and their plurals should be listed here.
    For example, the code {{theplural|suffix}}, in the right code of the right template, is likely to generate "Category:Portuguese suffixes" or other similar texts. On the other hand, the plural of "mess" being "messes" is likely irrelevant for Wiktionary templates, so a code {{theplural|mess}} is not supposed to be used or yield the actual pluralized value.
  • Only one plural per word is foreseeably enough.
  • Due to the behavior of automatically adding s to any word not listed, it is thereby not necessary to list words whose plural follow this pattern.
    For example, the value "verb" is likely to be used in Wiktionary templates, but {{theplural|verb}} would return "verbs" anyway.