Plural of “hoax”

The plural of hoax is hoaxes.

Why

"Hoax" ends in the sibilant cluster -x, which — like -s, -z, -ch, and -sh — can't take a bare -s in speech without the two sounds running together into an unpronounceable mess. English solves this the same way it has for centuries: inserting a light vowel sound before the -s, spelled -es, so the ending becomes its own audible syllable. "Hoaxes" is pronounced with two full syllables (HOHKS-iz), not "hoax's" jammed together.

The word itself is younger than most nouns with this spelling pattern — etymologists generally trace "hoax" to the 18th century, likely a contraction of "hocus," as in "hocus-pocus," the sham-Latin phrase stage magicians used to patter through a trick. That gives "hoax" an unusually traceable birth: a magician's word for deception that settled into general English meaning any deliberate falsehood meant to be believed. Its plural, though, follows the ordinary mechanical spelling rule rather than anything about its odd origin — any noun ending in -x gets -es, full stop.

Usage note

Writers rarely misspell this one, but a related mistake shows up in casual writing: treating "hoax" as if it could describe an ongoing pattern of deception without pluralizing, as in "there's been a lot of hoax online" — which is nonstandard. Each individual deceptive claim or story is one hoax, and multiple ones are hoaxes, countable the same way "lie" or "scam" would be.

Because "hoax" can also function as a verb ("they hoaxed thousands of readers"), some writers second-guess whether the noun plural changes form to match — it doesn't. The verb conjugates separately (hoax, hoaxes, hoaxed, hoaxing) while the noun plural stays "hoaxes" regardless of tense or context. It's worth noting that "hoax" is a rare example of a modern English coinage that still followed an ancient spelling rule automatically, without anyone consciously deciding it should — the -es ending wasn't chosen by dictionary-makers for "hoax" any more than it was for "box" centuries earlier; it simply falls out of how English handles sibilant endings whenever a new word with that shape enters the language.

Common real mistakes

The apostrophe error is the one to watch for: "hoax's" is possessive singular ("the hoax's origin"), not a plural, but autocorrect and quick typing sometimes insert an apostrophe where none belongs when writers are rushing through a plural. There is no such thing as "hoaxs" — the -es is mandatory for the sibilant ending.

The wider pattern

Any English noun ending in a sibilant sound — -s, -ss, -x, -z, -ch, -sh — takes -es rather than bare -s for exactly this reason: box/boxes, fox/foxes, wish/wishes, glass/glasses. It's one of the oldest and most consistent spelling rules in the language, predating almost every irregular plural on this site.

Examples

• The chain email turned out to be one of several hoaxes circulating that year.
• Museum staff have debunked dozens of hoaxes about the artifact's origin.
• Two separate hoaxes about the eclipse spread within hours of each other.
• Historians still argue over which Victorian-era hoaxes fooled the most readers.
• The website tracks viral hoaxes as they spread across social media.
• Several elaborate hoaxes have targeted the same small town over the decades.
• Fact-checkers flagged three hoaxes trending under the same hashtag.
• The prank show built its entire format around elaborate hoaxes.
• Old newspaper hoaxes were sometimes never corrected in print.
• Researchers compiled a database of scientific hoaxes going back a century.
• The prankster behind the hoaxes was eventually identified by investigators.
• Some famous hoaxes fooled even trained scientists for years before being exposed.
• The comedian built an entire career on elaborate, harmless hoaxes.
• Radio hoaxes from the early 20th century sometimes caused genuine public panic.