Plural of “buffalo”

The plural of buffalo is buffalo (some dictionaries also accept buffaloes).

Why

"Buffalo" traces through Portuguese "bufalo" and ultimately Greek "boubalos," originally naming Old World wild oxen and water buffalo. When English colonists in North America applied the word loosely to the American bison, they also carried over a zero plural, treating "buffalo" the way English already treated other large game animals like "deer" and "moose" — the same animal, whether one or many, keeping the same form.

"Buffaloes" and even "buffalos" also exist as accepted plurals, particularly in older written English and in contexts emphasizing individual distinct animals rather than a herd as a collective mass, which makes "buffalo" one of the few English nouns with three genuinely competing, all-defensible plural forms rather than one dominant form and a minor variant.

Usage note

For herds or the animal in general, the zero plural "buffalo" is most common and most idiomatic ("a herd of buffalo"). "Buffaloes" appears more often when a writer wants to emphasize countable individual animals, and "buffalos" is a less common but recognized regularized spelling seen mostly in older texts.

The famous "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" sentence, a linguistics classroom staple, exploits the fact that "buffalo" can simultaneously function as a city name, a noun for the animal, and a verb meaning to bully, producing a grammatically valid if practically unreadable sentence. American bison populations were reduced from an estimated tens of millions to only a few hundred individuals by the late 19th century due to mass hunting, a devastating history that both wildlife writing and Indigenous oral histories continue to document.

Common real mistakes

Confusingly, "buffalo" is also a verb meaning to intimidate or bewilder ("don't let him buffalo you"), and its plural noun forms have nothing to do with that separate sense — mixing the two only happens in the famously grammatical but nonsensical-sounding sentence "buffalo buffalo buffalo," a linguistics classic exploiting all of the word's different parts of speech at once. Writers should also be aware that "buffalo" is technically a misnomer for the American bison, a genuinely distinct species from the true Old World buffalo, though the informal name has been used so consistently in American English for centuries that dictionaries treat it as fully standard.

The wider pattern

"Buffalo" sits alongside "moose" and "deer" in the small class of large-game-animal zero plurals, but its additional accepted -es and -s forms set it apart from those stricter zero-plural words, showing a noun genuinely still in flux between three competing plurals rather than settled on just one.

Examples

• A herd of buffalo grazed across the open plain.
• Hunters once tracked buffalo across the entire western frontier.
• The reserve protects several hundred buffalo.
• Two buffaloes wandered away from the main herd.
• Native communities depended on buffalo for food, clothing, and shelter.
• The photographer captured a rare shot of migrating buffalo.
• Ranchers raise buffaloes alongside cattle in some parts of the state.
• Historic records describe buffalo numbering in the millions.
• A lone buffalo stood silhouetted against the sunset.
• The herd of buffalo crossed the river at dawn.
• The ranch maintains a small conservation herd of buffalo.
• Old photographs show buffaloes covering the plains for miles.
• The prairie once supported vast herds of buffalo.
• Rangers tracked the buffalo herd across the reserve.
• Photographers waited hours for a clear shot of the buffalo herd.
• The museum's exhibit traced the near extinction of the buffalo.
• The documentary followed a small herd of buffalo through winter.
• Conservationists reintroduced buffalo to the restored grassland.
• Historic paintings often depicted vast herds of buffalo on the plains.
• The tribe's traditions center on respect for the buffalo.
• The plains once thundered with the hooves of stampeding buffalo.
• Wildlife biologists radio-collared several buffalo for the study.