Plural of “crisis”

The plural of crisis is crises.

Why

Greek "krisis" originally meant "a decision" or "a turning point" — the same root that gives English "critic" and "critical" — and the word carried its native Greek pluralization habit into English along with its meaning: swap the final -is for -es, adding a whole extra spoken syllable ("CRY-seez") rather than a mere added consonant sound.

The word's meaning has broadened considerably since its original medical sense (the turning point of a disease, when a patient would either recover or worsen) into today's much more general use for any severe, decisive turning point — financial, political, personal — but the plural has stayed perfectly consistent across every one of those extended senses. The phrase "midlife crisis," now entirely embedded in everyday English, was actually coined by a psychoanalyst in the 1960s to describe a specific developmental transition, and it has since become so common in casual conversation that many speakers don't realize the term has a documented, relatively recent academic origin rather than being an old folk expression.

Usage note

Because "crisis" appears constantly in news writing about serious, high-stakes events, the plural "crises" is genuinely common in everyday journalism, unlike some of its more narrowly academic -is/-es cousins ("parenthesis," for instance), which most readers rarely encounter in plural form outside specialized writing.

"Crisis" is one of the few words in its -is/-es family to have developed a widely recognized compound modifier form, "crisis-level" or "crisis mode," where the singular stays fixed regardless of how many actual crises are being discussed, treating the word here as a descriptive unit rather than a literally countable noun. Crisis-management and public-relations professionals frequently distinguish between a single "crisis" and an ongoing "crisis situation" in their own internal terminology, a distinction of emphasis and duration rather than of number, that exists alongside, but separately from, the straightforward singular/plural grammar covered here. Historians of the word note that its earliest English uses were almost exclusively medical, describing the decisive turning point of a fever, and the now-dominant political and economic senses only became common centuries later.

Common real mistakes

Writing "crisises" is a real, if less common, overregularization error, and mispronouncing the plural with the same vowel sound as the singular is an even more frequent spoken mistake, since the spelling itself gives little indication that the final syllable changes sound in the plural. A further point some writers overlook: describing an ongoing, unresolved situation as multiple "crises" when it's really one continuous crisis can subtly mislead readers about the situation's structure, an error of framing rather than of grammar, but one careful writers should watch for regardless.

The wider pattern

Line up "crisis/crises" next to "thesis/theses," "analysis/analyses," "diagnosis/diagnoses," and "hypothesis/hypotheses" and you're looking at one tightly-knit Greek plural family — a group that has resisted regularizing even as individual members, "crisis" especially, became some of the most commonly used words in the whole English vocabulary.

Examples

• The country faced multiple economic crises within a single decade.
• Her personal crisis forced her to reconsider her entire career.
• The government's response to the crisis was widely criticized.
• Several overlapping crises strained the agency's limited resources.
• Historians study how past crises reshaped national policy.
• The company weathered two major financial crises in five years.
• Each crisis tested the administration's ability to respond quickly.
• The therapist helped him work through a genuine midlife crisis.
• Global health crises often expose weaknesses in public infrastructure.
• The board convened an emergency meeting to address the crisis.
• The company's leadership crisis dragged on for nearly eighteen months.
• Historians still debate which of the era's several crises mattered most.
• The crisis hotline reported a sharp rise in calls during the holidays.
• Emergency responders trained for months to prepare for a potential crisis.
• The board called an emergency session to address the unfolding crisis.
• A well-rehearsed response plan helped the team manage the crisis calmly.