I recently came across a Tumblr post by a user called skepkitty claiming that the plural of the word "beef" is "beeves."
Another user then commented on the post, saying that they had looked it up and, apparently, yes, if you wanted to refer to multiple hunks of beef it would be grammatically correct to say "beeves." What the fuck.
People on Tumblr were pretty upset.
In my 27 years on this Earth, I had never heard of this before. So, I had to look this shit up myself.
According to THREE different dictionaries, "beeves" is a real word.
What the fuck.
I decided to take this all the way to the top. I decided to ask BuzzFeed's copy chief, Emmy Favilla, about it. She was as shocked as I was.
Emmy was pro-beeves, though. But she also made an even weirder discovery.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, you CAN'T use the word "beeves" to refer to things like rap beefs or Twitter beefs — which is literally the only time I could imagine using "beeves."
Foodbeast did some research about this whole thing back in 2014 and according to Google Books data, "beeves" peaked in popularity in the 1800s.
