The singular of biceps...

...is biceps. Period. The "s" in biceps has nothing to do with plural, it is the Latin ending.

Can we spread the word?

I'm sick and tired of seeing incorrect grammar spread because of social media.

This applies for triceps and quadriceps as well

Sounds good to me!

Language changes. We don’t speak Latin. “Bicep” has been used as the singular for most of modern history. If you’re going to insist on a linguistic technicality from 500AD, you might as well really dig in and call it a biceps brachii, meaning “two headed muscle of the arm”

Language changes. We don’t speak Latin. “Bicep” has been used as the singular for most of modern history. If you’re going to insist on a linguistic technicality from 500AD, you might as well really dig in and call it a biceps brachii, meaning “two headed muscle of the arm”

Not true. Once a loan word becomes a part of another language, it is part of that language. And loan words are part of how languages change. Which is why "biceps" is the correct singular form in English too. I regularly do the mistake of using "bicep" myself but that's not supposed to be a quality argument for ignoring what's been considered correct, in English no less, for ages. Only thing my mistake means is that I made it.

Like triceps and quadriceps, it was a name applied to a specific of the body, because that number has significance. In the case of muscles, it was the observed number of “lumps”.

From Latin biceps (“double-headed, two peaked”), from bis (“double”) + caput (“head”).

The plural form in latin is more like “bicipites”.

So, if we’re talking about what the singular or plural form should be in English, I think it’s pretty clear we’ve already surrendered Latin grammar, except as a starting point.

You can deploy arguments of preference and precedence. Neither of those are ironclad guarantees against language changes. If you do find a way I’d love to go back and fix “scissors”.

I don't see the point of using Latin to support a discussion about English morphology. My mother tongue is Italian, and in our language, maybe the most similar to Latin between modern language, we have different forms for singular and plural (bicipite, bicipti, note that usually Italian words end with a wovel, and the plural is done by changing the final wovel)

This^

Also, anyone who wants to whine about the fact that language has changed and tell people they’re wrong, is an edge-lord.

Language exists to communicate thought and ideas. If I say “bicep,” you know exactly what I’m talking about. There’s no need to ask if I actually mean “biceps.”

There’s lots of instances in English where the plural form of a noun is the same as the singular form. It’s not the dominant form, but it happens. For example, “moose.“That’s what we’re talking about here. What’s wrong with trying to improve usage? Don’t take away the final “S“ in biceps for singular, because the word is in a minority of cases where it doesn’t work that way. Not that complicated.

Because we are not machines, we respect the etymology, history and beauty of languages. The argument that spelling doesn't matter if I understand the meaning is an open invitation for the lazy and/or uneducated and is unacceptable to me.

We need to put things into perspective here. The all thing probably started because someone who couldn't spell biceps dropped it without an "s" somewhere. And then with social media it just spread like a virus, since a frightening number of people can't write a few sentences without misspellings--even though it seems everybody thinks they're a philosopher nowadays. You can't possibly defend that or you might as well close schools and give the key to our communication to a 3 year old.