Chambers of Commerce?

Question

When referring to more than one chamber of commerce, would it be correct to say chambers of commerce?

Just got a very weird mental image of a pile of eggs topped with the remaining elements of a single mcmuffin. — Bryan Downing, Oct 15 '10 at 19:15

score 10 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 22 '22 at 08:16

10

My intuition is that the plural is chambers of commerce, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) backed up my intuition:

CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE   145
CHAMBERS OF COMMERCES  1
CHAMBER OF COMMERCES   0

edited Jun 22 '22 at 08:16

Community

answered Oct 14 '10 at 23:46

nohat

2

Of course, one has much more than intuition to go on -- 'of commerce' is acting as an adjective, modifying 'chamber'. This means that 'chamber' is the thing that we pluralise (for example, we don't pluralise the adjective in 'green pasture', or we would get 'greens pasture' rather than 'green pastures'). – J D OConal Oct 15 '10 at 00:27
1

Indeed; the same applies to, say, mothers-in-law. – Steve Melnikoff Oct 15 '10 at 12:34

1 Answers1