Plural of “video”
The plural of video is videos.
Why
"Video" comes from Latin "videre," to see, and entered English in the mid-20th century alongside the development of television technology, functioning as a noun in its own right from very early on rather than as a clipping of some longer English word. As a modern technical coinage, it settled immediately into a plain -s plural.
Because "video" arrived so recently and so squarely within a technological, rather than literary or classical, context, it never had any real chance to develop a competing -oes form the way older borrowings like "echo" or "hero" did; every English -o noun coined or firmly established after roughly the mid-19th century has taken a plain -s almost without exception. The word's spread closely tracked the rollout of home television in the 1950s and, later, home video recorders (VCRs) in the 1970s and 80s, each technological wave giving "video" a new everyday context and reinforcing its already well-established plain -s plural.
Usage note
"Videos" is standard in every context, from television production to online streaming and casual phone recordings. As a mass noun describing the medium generally ("shot on video" rather than film), "video" stays uncountable and singular, distinct from its countable sense referring to individual recordings, which pluralizes normally.
"Video" began as a technical adjective ("video signal," "video display") before fully establishing itself as an independent noun by the 1950s and 60s alongside the spread of television broadcasting technology, a path shared by several other mid-century tech terms that started life describing a process before becoming a countable object in their own right. Online platforms have massively expanded the word's everyday frequency since the 2000s, with "videos" now among the most commonly searched and referenced plural nouns in casual digital communication, from social media captions to everyday conversation about what someone watched that day.
Common real mistakes
There's no real plural confusion with this word; if anything, the confusion runs the other direction, with some learners of English assuming an -o noun this common must have some exception to the plain -s rule, when in fact it's one of the clearest, most reliable examples of it. The mass-noun/countable-noun distinction above is the more genuine source of error, since writers occasionally pluralize the uncountable sense unnecessarily ("shot on videos" instead of the correct "shot on video").
The wider pattern
"Video" pluralizes exactly like "radio," "studio," and "silo": all four are modern technical or industrial coinages that entered English long after the -oes ending had stopped being applied to newly arriving -o nouns, making a plain -s the automatic, unremarkable choice for this entire generation of vocabulary.
Examples
- The company produced dozens of training videos for new employees.
- She uploaded three videos to the channel this week.
- The security cameras recorded videos of the entire incident.
- Old home videos captured birthdays from decades ago.
- The teacher assigned several videos as homework before class.
- Viral videos spread across social media within hours.
- The museum played short videos explaining each exhibit.
- He edited the videos late into the night before the deadline.
- Instructional videos walked viewers through each step of the repair.
- The archive holds thousands of historical newsreel videos.
- The platform recommended several videos based on her viewing history.
- Coaches reviewed game videos to break down the opposing team's plays.
- The nonprofit released a series of short videos explaining its mission.
- The tutorial videos walked beginners through each setting step by step.
- She rewatched the videos twice before attempting the recipe.
- The classroom streamed instructional videos during the snow closure.
- The channel posted new videos every Thursday afternoon without fail.
- The archive digitized old training videos from the 1980s.
- She trimmed the videos down before uploading them.