This gem's purpose is twofold: to remove the cruft from ActiveSupport's inflections and provide a more sane set of defaults for Ruby/Rails applications in English while also providing default rules for other languages.

At the time of this gem's publication, the English list of inflections in ActiveSupport is a mess. It is riddled with special cases such as a special pluralization rule for "octopus" and "virus", even though they follow a regular rule (as octopi and viri are disputed terms). Similar pluralization rules exist for "ox", "quiz", "mouse", "louse", etc.

Many of the special cases that ActiveSupport defines will not see the light of day in an application. Other rules exist that are actually gramatical exceptions, such as changing "f" to a "v" when encountered at the end of the word (which then requires even more rules to fix special words such as "drive", "safe", "hive", etc.). And, of course, who can forget the special pluralization of "cow" to the archaic term of Scottish origin, "kine" (the plural of "kye")?

Add the following to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'inflections'

And then execute:

$ bundle

To inflect strings in a different locale:

'persona'.pluralize(:es)
# => "personas"
'madame'.pluralze(:fr)
# => "mesdames"

Define your own additional rules as such:

ActiveSupport::Inflector.inflections(:en) do |inflect|
  inflect.singular /(phase)s$/i, '\1'
  inflect.plural /(shel|kni)fe/, '\1ves'
  inflect.irregular 'foot', 'feet'
  inflect.uncountable %w[money fish]
end

If you're not using ActiveSupport 4, the multilingual Inflector won't be supported. You should install inflections 3.2.x and you'll have to choose which locale you use by requiring a specific file:

gem 'inflections', '~> 3.2', require: 'inflections/en'

• English (en)
• British English (en-GB)
• Spanish (es)
• French (fr)
• Kazakh (kk)
• Norwegian Bokmål (nb)
• Turkish (tr)

If you are fluent in a language not yet included in this gem, please consider creating a list of inflections and submitting a pull request.

Please note that pull requests for already supported languages will only be accepted for rules that are in error or a potentially missed rule. If your change is an exception to an existing rule, that exception must occur frequently and must involve words used more frequently than the regular plurals. If your change is an irregularity, it must be a word that is arguably frequently encountered in applications that would use ActiveSupport. The default list of inflections is meant to be short.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature') with tests
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request