activesupport: "police".singularize returns "polouse"

It's not a singular word.

"Hundreds of police deployed to curb J'lem anti-gay pride parade riots"

This is the first result in google for "hundreds of police" (you can find more, I'm sure). "police" is often used as a plural word, especially in news articles.

I'm also not quite sure how the suggested change would bloat the code. inflections.rb is a file that contains special cases for the inflector, and all I'm saying is that the regular expression that was supposed to catch "lice" and turn it into "louse" overmatches and catches "police" and turns it into "polouse". The change is a single character.

Mere curiosity: Why would you put something in an inflector method that shouldn't be pluralized/singularized anyway?

However, you can fix this by just making it uncountable like e.g. water.

I'm trying to extract entities from text, and when I run across a phrase like "hundreds of *noun*", I assume noun is in plural form, and "hundreds of police", without any trailing noun such as officer or man, is actually quite common, and in these cases, police really is plural.

But enough of that I guess, since there seems to be disagreement over whether or not police is plural, singular, or neither. Consider the word blouse...activesupport will return "blice" for "blouse".pluralize. My point is, the lice/louse, mice/mouse pairing is the exception, rather than the rule, but that isn't how it is implemented. Right now it overmatches and applies these changes to any string that ends with "louse" or "lice".

I think hqnguyen83 has a valid point here.