Is the plural of "BlackBerry", BlackBerries or BlackBerrys?
I am asking, because I'm altering the underlying brand name to look more like the food and less like the product, leaving the reader to infer it from context.
Learn English – the plural of “BlackBerry” (as in the handheld device)
brandsgrammatical-numberorthography
Related Solutions
I don't think there's anything grammatically wrong with the phrasing, but it does seem rather clumsy to me. I'd probably have written (history and development of words).
Using "development" in the singular is simply because the alternative is even more clumsy, but syntactically both are acceptable (see this question on difference between "on their back/backs").
Well, this is an example of why Google NGrams isn't a precise indicator. When we compare the two directly, aircrafts simply can't get off the ground:
Now, this result is also flawed since it is impossible to separate uses of aircraft (singular) and aircraft (plural). It is also impossible to factor out typos (aircrafts vs. aircraft's) and so on.
The point is, don't read too much into what an NGram shows (or at least take the graphs with a grain of salt), because a great deal of the time what you wind up with is this sort of thing:
(BTW, the huge spike in the use of aircraft in the early '40s is almost certainly due to the air war in Europe and the Pacific.)
Best Answer
I appreciate @senderle's choice to consider the New York Times as a source for common usage.
However, I found the "proper" answer in a BlackBerry Branding Guidelines PDF from 2007 (page 5):
and
This is in agreement with what some other answers have suggested.