Plural of “child”

The plural of child is children.

Why

"Child" is a rare double-marked plural: Old English "cild" originally pluralized with an old -ru/-er ending (visible today in German's plural "Kinder"), producing an intermediate Middle English form "childer" or "children" that then had the more common weak plural ending -en added on top of the already-plural -er, giving a plural marked twice over rather than once.

This double-marking likely happened because "childer" alone had stopped feeling clearly plural to speakers once the old -er plural pattern became rare and unfamiliar elsewhere in the language, so an additional, more recognizable plural marker (-en, also seen in "oxen" and archaic "brethren") got layered on for clarity — a natural repair when an older grammatical signal starts to feel too faint to register on its own. Compare this to the closely related but distinct word "childhood," which is fully regular and uncountable, never pluralizing at all ("happy childhoods" is grammatically valid but describes multiple people's separate childhoods, not one shared uncountable stretch of time), unlike "children," which is always countable and always irregular.

Usage note

"Children" is the only accepted modern plural; there is no genuine competing form the way "cactuses"/"cacti" compete, since "childer" and "childs" both died out centuries ago and would read as archaic or simply incorrect in any modern context. In formal demographic and statistical writing, "children" is also used as shorthand for an entire age-based population category ("children under twelve represent 15 percent of the population"), a generalized, non-specific use of the plural that behaves grammatically like any other plural count noun despite referring to an abstract statistical group rather than any particular group of kids.

"Children" is also unusual in that it has no informal or dialectal competing form the way many irregular plurals do — there's no casual "childs" the way there's a casual "gots" or regional "youse," which suggests the word's high frequency in everyday speech, from infancy onward, keeps its irregular form thoroughly reinforced across every register and generation. Legal and government writing frequently uses "minor children" as a fixed formal phrase in custody, inheritance, and immigration documents, where "children" functions with a precise legal meaning (dependents under the age of majority) rather than its broader everyday sense, which can include adult sons and daughters when used in phrases like "her children are all grown now." Note too that "child" is grammatically singular even in the fixed phrase "child support," which covers payments regardless of how many children are involved.

Common real mistakes

Toddlers and very young learners commonly say "childs" before they've absorbed the exception, applying the regular -s rule the same way they would to any new noun — a textbook overgeneralization stage in language acquisition rather than a lasting error, and one that fades quickly as exposure to "children" builds up. Beyond the plural itself, "child" behaves like a completely ordinary noun in every derived form (child's, childish, childhood), so the irregularity stays confined to pluralization alone rather than spreading into the rest of the word family.

The wider pattern

Only one other common English noun preserves a trace of the same old -er plural still visible in "children": the archaic "brethren" (from "brother"), which has narrowed almost entirely to a specifically religious or ceremonial register, unlike "children," which remains the fully ordinary, everyday plural of "child" in ordinary speech.

Examples

• The children played in the yard until sunset.
• Both of her children attend the same school.
• The classroom was full of excited children on the first day.
• Each child received a small gift at the party.
• The charity provides meals for hundreds of children every week.
• Their children have grown up and moved away.
• The teacher praised each child individually.
• Their children were born two years apart.
• Children learn language remarkably quickly.
• The shelter cares for children who need temporary housing.