The ABCs of RBIs

5 comments July 26th, 2008

This came up recently, and the sports editor and I batted it around. The correct plural of the baseball term “RBI” (”run batted in”) is “RBIs,” even though the word that’s plural when it’s spelled out (”runs”) is at the start of the initialism. This does NOT mean that we’re actually saying “run batted ins.”

It just doesn’t work that way. By the same reasoning, why would more than one “IOU” be “IOUs” — there is NO plural in the expression “I owe you,” unless it’s more than one “you,” which is still “you.”

Fortunately, there are other examples of this sort of thing, as pointed out in “Garner’s Modern American Usage.” The plural of “WMD” (”weapon  of mass destruction”) is “WMDs.” If you have been using “WMD” as the plural, you probably are one of those folks who feel strongly that “RBI” also is correct.

The other common one is “POWs” for “prisoners of war.” If you have been insisting on usage such as “there are still thousands of POW,” you probably will never change no matter what I say.

For the rest of you, form the plural of an initialism or an acronym by adding “s” — no matter what it stands for.