Learn English – Plural of Friday 13th

grammatical-number

On another StackExchange QA site, I asked a math question involving Friday 13th. It deals with years having more than one Friday 13th.

I used 'Fridays 13th' as the plural form of 'Friday 13th'. Was I right? Or it should be 'Friday 13ths'? Or even 'Fridays 13ths' (that somehow looks nice to me, but I doubt it is correct)?

My research:

  • Google search for +"fridays the 13th" gives 36.600 results;
  • Google search for +"friday the 13ths" gives 239.000 results.

Examples of reputable internet sites using both versions:

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Best Answer

I would argue that "Friday the 13th" (with the the) is such a common set phrase that it behaves as a syntactic atom, i.e. something that shouldn't be split up by syntactic processes. In my experience, people almost never pause at any point when pronouncing the phrase "Friday the 13th", and it all has one continuous intonational contour.

This is all to back up my intuition that, as a native speaker (of American English), Friday the 13ths is the only plural form I can possibly imagine myself speaking here. It does look a little funny in writing, but so does Fridays the 13th, so I'd go with the more natural spoken form.

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