Plural of “half”

The plural of half is halves.

Why

The plural 'halves' is a product of a purely phonetic accident in Old English: whenever the final /f/ of 'healf' found itself sandwiched between two vowels, as it was in the old plural ending, speakers voiced it to /v/, and that pronunciation habit fossilized into today's spelling long after the vowel that triggered it had disappeared from speech.

Where most of the f-to-v family names physical objects — "knife," "wolf" — "half" instead lives inside ordinary counting and fraction vocabulary, which puts the word and its plural into constant everyday rotation across arithmetic, sports commentary, and telling time, from "two halves of the game" to "half past three." Sports usage specifically isn't as uniform as it might seem: soccer and basketball have traditionally split play into two halves apiece, but basketball at higher competitive levels has increasingly moved toward quarters instead, a detail that has nothing to do with grammar but shapes how often "halves" actually gets said out loud in practice.

Usage note

"Halves" is the only accepted plural noun form; "halfs" is a genuine error, never standard in any register, though the possessive and verb forms built on "half" behave differently — "he halves the recipe" is a correct, fully regular verb conjugation, distinct from the noun's irregular plural.

"Half" functions unusually flexibly across parts of speech — noun ("a half"), adjective ("a half hour"), adverb ("half finished") — and only the noun sense pluralizes at all, since the adjective and adverb uses of "half" don't inflect for number the way a countable noun does, staying fixed regardless of context. Financial and business writing frequently uses "half" to describe fiscal reporting periods ("first half earnings," "second half projections"), and in that specific business register, "halves" appears constantly when comparing performance across multiple such periods or multiple companies. Cooking measurements frequently rely on 'half' as a fraction rather than a countable noun ('half a cup'), a distinct grammatical role from the countable plural 'halves' discussed throughout this entry.

Common real mistakes

"Halfs" for "halves" is the main mistake here, typically from learners who haven't yet extended the f-to-v shift to this particular word the way they already have for more familiar cases like "knife" or "leaf." A separate, unrelated wrinkle: the verb "to halve" (to divide into two equal parts) happens to share its v-spelling with the plural noun, despite the two words functioning in completely different grammatical roles. And a further subtlety worth noting: "half" stays singular inside a hyphenated compound before a noun ("a half-hour meeting"), mirroring the measurement-noun behavior seen with "foot," with "halves" reserved strictly for cases where the word stands alone as a genuine countable noun.

The wider pattern

Half a dozen other everyday nouns fossilized the identical /f/-to-/v/ voicing switch once their own plural endings dropped an in-between vowel: 'knife,' 'wife,' 'leaf,' and 'loaf' all show the same pattern, none of them related to 'half' by meaning, only by the accident of once sharing the same phonetic environment.

Examples

• She cut the sandwich into two neat halves.
• The team dominated both halves of the match.
• He split the profits into equal halves with his partner.
• Both halves of the orange were perfectly ripe.
• The book is divided into two distinct halves.
• They shared the pizza, each eating exactly half.
• The bridge's two halves finally met in the middle.
• She divided the class into two halves for the exercise.
• The score was tied at the end of both halves.
• He measured out careful halves of flour and sugar.
• Sales figures for the first two halves of the year varied dramatically.
• The recipe asked for halves of two different citrus fruits.
• He devoured half the pizza before anyone else even sat down.
• The two halves of the broken vase were glued back together carefully.