Prai Jei <pvstownsend.zyx.abc@n...> writes:

> James Hogg set the following eddies spiralling through the space-time continuum:
>
>> The OED has these quotations:
>> 
>> "1765 W. WARD Grammar IV. iv. 167 Several participles cannot
>> conveniently be used so as to affect every part of long serieses of
>> words immediately."
>> 
>> "1797 Encycl. Brit. (ed. 3) XVIII. 514/1 Two serieses are completed
>> in the exact time of a lunation."
>> 
>> Apparently the plural could be spelt (that's not Triticum spelta)
>> "serieses" or "series's" in the 17th and 18th centuries.
>> 
>> Not that I'm recommending it for use today. Your solution looks
>> good.
>
> Isn't series already a plural? (F only knows what the singular might
> have been though.) No probs with spelt by the way, I'm a native BrE
> speaker.

It's a plural now, but it started out as just the singular.  The OED
dates the use of "series" as the plural of "series" to the eighteenth
century, but the singular is cited to the seventeenth.  As James
notes, in the seventeenth and eighteenth the plural was "serieses" or
"series's", the former noted as also existing, but being rare, in the
nineteeth century.

-- 
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