The basic rules for pluralizing words in the English language are roughly, as follows: if a noun ends in ch, s, sh, j, x, or z, it is made plural by adding es to the end. If the noun ends in y and is preceded by a consonant, replace the y with ies. If the word ends in ium, replace with ia (Chicago Manual of Style 2010). Of course, there are many more rules and even more exceptions, but you can implement a basic set of rules to convert singular words to plural based on these rules and then try them out on the following list of words.

A common task in transcribing audio is cleaning up text, removing certain phrases such as um, er, and so on, and other tags that are used to make a note of some sort. For example, the following transcription of a lecture from the University of Warwick, Centre for Applied Linguistics (Base Corpus), contains quite a few fragments that should be removed, including newline characters, parenthetical remarks, and nonwords. Use StringReplace with the appropriate rules to clean this text and then apply your code to a larger corpus.

n[6]: words ("building", "finch", "fix", "ratio", "envy", "boy", "baby", "faculty", "honorarium");