| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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3. Word Choice: New Uses, Common Confusion, and Constraints
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| § 189. kudos |
| Everyone likes to get kudos, but how much—or how many? Kudos means “praise.” It comes from a Greek word that meant “glory” and is thus one of those words like congeries that look like plurals but are etymologically singular. So if you want to get the Greek right, you must use a singular verb: Kudos is (not are) due her for her brilliant work. | 1 |
| This is not to say you will never see kudos used with a plural verb or treated as if it were a count noun meaning “a praising remark,” as in They have received many kudos for their research. It happens quite frequently. Some writers have tried to defend this use of kudos and even the singular form kudo, on the grounds that these usages follow the same pattern of words such as pea and cherry. These words were shortened from nouns ending in -s that were mistakenly thought to be plural. But if you decide to join in championing this view and offer someone a few kudos, don’t be surprised if you are accused of being ignorant of kudos’s Greek origins. | 2 |
| Oddly enough, people who are careful to treat the word only as a singular often pronounce it as if it were a plural. Etymology would require that the final consonant be pronounced as a voiceless (s), as we do in pathos, another word derived from Greek, rather than as a voiced (z). For more on this, see
kudos under Pronunciation. | 3 |
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| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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