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Ruby on Rails has a lot of helpful modules and methods that can save us a lot of time. One such module is Inflector, which is something that can save up a lot of time in transforming words from singular to plural and a lot more.

Here is the official description:

The Inflector transforms words from singular to plural, class names to table names, modularized class names to ones without, and class names to foreign keys. The default inflections for pluralization, singularization, and uncountable words are kept in inflections.rb.

Some of its methods are already quite plural such as capitalizing words, but the method of turning nouns into their plural form is something that is rarely mentioned anywhere.

Here are a few examples of it:

pluralize('post')             # => "posts"
pluralize('octopus')          # => "octopi"
pluralize('sheep')            # => "sheep"
pluralize('words')            # => "words"
pluralize('CamelOctopus')     # => "CamelOctopi"
pluralize('ley', :es)         # => "leyes"

I believe that we need to specifically mention that these helpful methods exist. We need to tell about them to colleagues or write about them so that they can know that they exist.

If you don’t know that they exist, then you may invest a lot more time implementing them on your own.

I hope you find it useful.

Happy coding!