It's Official: Even The Oxford English Dictionary Won’t Support Changing the Plural of “Vinyl” to “Vinyls"

Are you a vinyl collector? Or are you a vinyls collector? The pluralization of the most symbolic object of the music industry has often defaulted to "vinyl", joining other irregular plurals such as "sheep" and "aircraft" (actually, vinyl is a mass noun, not an irregular plural, but that's pedantic either way). Now a stalwart group of record enthusiasts have started a campaign on the grassroots petition site change.com to cement "vinyls" as the official plural.

"[We are] a small but vocal cabal among the vinyl enthusiast community," writes the lead campaigner Aaron Henager, "who seek to control the language of our hobby via bullying and ridiculing those who use the term 'vinyls' to describe 2 or more units of vinyl recorded media. In an effort to promote inclusiveness, we would like to have the term 'vinyls' enshrined as the official plural term for vinyl recorded media. This will also serve the essential purpose of annoying people who would rather ridicule a complete stranger than say something encouraging to a fellow 'vinyls' collector, especially those who may be just getting started in the hobby."

To find out how much support might back the campaign, we reached out to DJs, label owners, and record store managers to see what their opinions were on the topic. "This is a joke, right?" said the beloved Brooklyn hub Record Grouch's Brian Gempp. "It seems like a degradation to strong arm people into using either / or."

Of the label owner and two DJs who returned THUMPs inquiry, all three politely declined to comment.

Could a campaign to change the usage of a word even be considered by the institutions that uphold them? Not really. According to the Oxford University Press, the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary: "We will update a definition in OxfordDictionaries.com if evidence from resources such as the Oxford English Corpus suggests that a word is being used in a different way. Since the dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive, we will not change a definition solely because we or others believe a word should be used differently." The entry for vinyl currently pluralizes vinyl as material (a synthetic resin), but not as a product, though apparently a dictionary was not consulted by the campaign's founder. While we're looking stuff up, vinyl was first derived from ethylenes found in wines (its latinate vinum is where vinyl takes its name), and as a resin replaced wax records in 1939.

The campaign so far has been signed by 35 people with a goal of 100 signatures needed. What happens then has yet to be published on the campaign page.