Pluralizing in the .NET Framework

It is always statically frustrating / tedious and awful code you need to write when you have to pluralize or singularize a word. What is even worse is when people don’t bother doing that and just leave the singularized word in a grammatically incorrect state, glaring the user in the eye.

Most people forget, or just haven’t taken notice to a nicely hidden service in the System.Data.Entity.Design namespace titled: PluralizationService. This service is available as of .NET 4 and up, and offers exactly what you think it would. The ability to convert a word to singular or plural, and also identify if a word is already pluralized or singularized. Never again, should you have an excuse for messy or unwritten code in relation to pluralization.

Check out the MSDN definition:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.data.entity.design.pluralizationservices.pluralizationservice(v=vs.110).aspx

Check out this blog that gives a code snippet for simple usage:

http://zquanghoangz.blogspot.ca/2012/02/beginner-with-pluralizationservices.html

Happy pluralizing!!

2 Comments

  1. Michael says:

    Thanks for the tip Travis, I’ll have to check it out. I use a great little library called Humanizer for this. It pluralizes words and a lot more:
    https://github.com/MehdiK/Humanizer

    • travis says:

      I just took a look at the Humanizer library. This indeed does look awesome. Thanks for passing this along Michael, I may just use it in my next project!

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