Plural of “analysis”

The plural of analysis is analyses.

Why

"Analysis" comes directly from Greek "analusis" (a loosening, or breaking up), and English kept the Greek plural pattern for -is nouns: -is becomes -es (pronounced with a full extra syllable, "an-AL-uh-seez," not simply adding an s sound). This same pattern governs "crisis/crises," "thesis/theses," "diagnosis/diagnoses," and "hypothesis/hypotheses" — an unusually consistent, still-productive irregular pattern for a whole family of academic vocabulary.

Unlike "cactus" or "octopus," this -is/-es family shows almost no sign of regularizing toward a plain -s plural ("analysises" essentially never occurs), likely because the pattern is shared identically across so many common academic and scientific words that speakers reinforce it constantly through exposure to the whole group, rather than treating each word as an isolated exception to memorize separately. The word also appears in the fixed phrase "analysis paralysis," describing being unable to act because of overthinking a decision, where "analysis" functions as the uncountable mass-noun sense discussed above rather than as a countable noun that could ever take the irregular plural.

Usage note

The main practical challenge with "analyses" is pronunciation, not spelling — many learners read the plural ending as if it rhymed with the singular "-is" rather than shifting to the longer "-eez" sound the plural actually takes, an easy slip since nothing in ordinary English spelling signals that vowel change. In computing and grammar specifically, "parse" and "analysis" overlap conceptually but never share vocabulary — a compiler "parses" code rather than "analyzing" it in casual technical speech, even though the two processes are closely related, showing how specialized fields sometimes prefer one near-synonym over another for reasons of professional convention rather than precise meaning.

Because "analyses" is both the plural of the noun "analysis" and identical in spelling to a verb form in some contexts ("the software analyses the data," British spelling of "analyze"), British English writers occasionally have to rely on context alone to tell whether "analyses" is a plural noun or a present-tense verb — American English avoids this ambiguity since it spells the verb "analyzes." The compound "meta-analysis," describing a statistical analysis that combines the results of many separate studies, pluralizes the same way as its root word ("meta-analyses"), extending the identical Greek plural pattern into one of the most common technical terms in modern medical and social-science research literature.

Common real mistakes

Writing "analysises" as a regularized plural is a real but relatively rare error, most often produced by learners applying the general -s rule before they've absorbed the whole -is/-es family pattern from other academic vocabulary. A further register-based note: "analysis" itself, as an uncountable mass noun describing the general activity ("a lot of analysis went into this"), never pluralizes at all in that sense, and only becomes countable, taking the irregular plural "analyses," when referring to individual, discrete analytical write-ups or studies rather than the general activity of analyzing.

The wider pattern

The same -is/-es pattern governs "crisis/crises," "thesis/theses," "diagnosis/diagnoses," "hypothesis/hypotheses," "parenthesis/parentheses," and "synopsis/synopses" — a remarkably large and internally consistent family of Greek-derived academic vocabulary that shows almost no sign of regularizing, likely because so many related words reinforce the same pattern for anyone who reads or writes in academic or scientific registers regularly.

Examples

• The report included three separate analyses of the market data.
• Her analysis of the results was thorough and precise.
• Both analyses reached strikingly similar conclusions.
• The lab ran multiple analyses before confirming the finding.
• A deeper analysis revealed a flaw in the original method.
• Reviewers compared the two analyses side by side.
• The professor assigned a comparative analysis of both texts.
• Independent analyses confirmed the original findings.
• Their analyses diverged sharply on the cause of the delay.
• A follow-up analysis addressed the earlier criticism.