Plural of “goose”
The plural of goose is geese.
Why
"Goose" traces to Old English "gos" with plural "ges," another case of i-mutation: a lost plural ending once fronted the vowel in the root before disappearing itself, leaving the changed vowel as the sole marker of number, exactly as it did in "foot/feet" and "tooth/teeth."
The verb "to goose" (meaning to poke someone startlingly, or to give something a sudden boost, as in "goose the economy") is unrelated in grammar to the irregular noun plural — it conjugates completely regularly (gooses, goosed, goosing) and never takes the vowel-shift pattern, since English verbs derived by conversion from nouns don't inherit the noun's own irregular inflection. Culturally, geese have carried a long-standing reputation for aggression and territoriality in English-speaking farm life, reflected in the older expression "silly goose" used affectionately for a scatterbrained person, a connotation that sits in genuine tension with the bird's reputation elsewhere for surprising cleverness in flock navigation and long-distance migration. None of that folk reputation touches the grammar, though — the vowel-shift plural was already fixed in the language centuries before "silly goose" or any of the bird's other figurative baggage ever developed.
Usage note
"Geese" is the only correct plural for the bird in every register; the folk plural "gooses" does not exist in standard English the way a handful of other irregular nouns retain a rare colloquial regularized form, which makes "goose/geese" one of the more stable irregular plurals in the language.
The idiom "what's good for the goose is good for the gander" never budges out of the singular, no matter how many people the saying is actually being applied to — "goose" here is locked into the fixed expression rather than functioning as an ordinary noun naming an actual bird, the same idiomatic freeze found across plenty of other animal sayings. Named goose species — Canada goose, snow goose, greylag goose — all inherit the identical irregular "geese" in heraldry and formal ornithology writing regardless of which species name precedes it, since the compound simply borrows the base noun's plural rather than switching to a regular ending.
Common real mistakes
The most common mix-up isn't spelling but confusing this bird plural with the unrelated verb "gooses" ("the announcement gooses the stock price"), which is correctly spelled with a regular -s because it's a present-tense verb form, not the plural noun at all — the two words simply happen to look similar on the page. Some writers also mistakenly assume the verb "to goose" must share the noun's irregular pattern given how closely the words are spelled, when in fact the verb has always been fully regular throughout its documented history in English.
The wider pattern
"Goose/geese" sits alongside "foot/feet," "tooth/teeth," and "mouse/mice" in the same small, closed family created by Old English i-mutation — a sound change that stopped being productive over a thousand years ago, so nothing new joins this club today, however similar a modern word might sound.
Examples
- A flock of geese flew south as winter approached.
- The farmer kept several geese near the pond.
- One goose chased the children across the yard.
- Wild geese honked overhead just before dawn.
- The park had a resident population of Canada geese.
- Each goose in the pen had its wing clipped.
- Geese mate for life, unlike many other waterfowl.
- A single goose can be surprisingly aggressive toward strangers.
- The lake was crowded with geese during migration season.
- Farmers once used geese as watchdogs for their loud honking.
- The nature reserve counted over three hundred geese during the autumn survey.
- A gaggle of geese waddled across the parking lot toward the pond.
- Farmers historically kept geese partly because they honk loudly at intruders.