Roofs is generally used, but is rooves archaic or just wrong?


Rooves is not wrong per se, but extremely uncommon nowadays. Here are the stats from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus:

           COCA      BNC
roofs      2307      653
rooves        1        5

The Corpus of Historical American English has 6 cites for rooves, one from 1890, two from 1930, two from 1950, and one from 1980.

Merriam-Webster doesn't even mention rooves at all. The Collins English Dictionary mentions the pronunciation /ruːvz/, but not the spelling rooves. Finally, Wiktionary has these usage notes:

The plural rooves is uncommon and is usually considered incorrect.

So if you want to be on the safe side, I would recommend going with roofs, especially if your audience is American.


Rooves as a plural for of roof is dated, but not incorrect. The Oxford English Dictionary lists “rooves” as an alternate to roofs, one of several outdated spellings used in the UK, and in New England as late as the 19th century.


It's not stated which source Google Dictionary used but they list both roofs and rooves as correct.


My Concise Oxford Dictionary (1991) shows rooves as a disputed spelling