Wikipedia:Plural Of Antenna

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In other projects Appearance move to sidebar hide From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Essay on editing Wikipedia

This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.

Shortcut WP:ANTENNAEWP:ANTENNAE

This page in a nutshell: There is no proscription against using the plural antennae in a radio context. Articles should not be changed to a different spelling without a sound policy-based reason

It is frequently stated that using the plural antennae for electrical aerials is incorrect. Those who say this believe that there is a grammatical rule that the plural in the context of radio is antennas and in the context of biology (insect feelers for example) the plural is antennae. This may have crystallised into a firm rule in the US, but actual usage in the rest of the world, and even amongst American authors, is not at all as clear cut as this. There is no denying that antennas is the more common plural used in the context of radio, but antennae is frequently used as well.

Evidence

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If this really were a firm rule, the one organisation that would be expected to be policing it would be the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a US based organisation with American roots and one of the most important electrical engineering societies in the world. Here are some quotes from papers by famous engineers found in the IEEE database IEEE Xplore,

• Reginald Fessenden, "Wireless telephony", Transactions of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers

From 1898 to 1900 numerous experiments were made on antennae of large capacity and it was found that instead of using sheets of solid metal or wire netting, single wires could be placed at a considerable fraction of the wave-length apart and yet give practically the same capacity effect as if the space between them were filled with solid conductors.

• Mihajlo Pupin, "A discussion on experimental tests of the radiation law for radio oscillators, Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers

When we come to the complicated forms of antennae which we use in practice to-day, it becomes excessively difficult to work out the theory mathematically.

• Oliver Lodge, "The fifth Kelvin Lecture: the electrification of the atmosphere, natural and artificial", Journal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers

At that time it was giving the full 50,000 volts, as measured by the needle spark-gap between the antennae and earth.

Now it could be argued that these are all quite old, and also Lodge is British, writing in a British journal, but there are no shortage of quotes from recent papers in IEEE published journals using antennae,

• "A new design of circular polarized planar antennae" (2010)
• "Connectivity trade-offs in 3D wireless sensor networks using directional antennae" (2011)
• Measuring 3-D surface motion with future SAR systems based on reflector antennae" (2016)
• "A combination of Alamouti code and beamforming technologies via dual-polarized antenna array systems" (2016)

In conventional design works relevant to antennae transmission, the space-time block coding (STBC) and beamforming (BF) gains could not be achieved at the same time usually.

• "Design of broadband end-fed dipole antenna for jamming application" (2016)

Furthermore, a comparative study between the radiation efficiency of a biconical dipole and cylindrical dipole both designed in 500–800 MHz band has been conducted in regard to weight and volume of the antennae.

• "Wide-band characterization of antennae plus aircraft platform patterns in L- and Ka-band" (2015)

Scholarly and informal usage

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In Dan Brown's Deception Point we find

Harper paced for several seconds around the wide table on which sat a scale model of the PODS satellite – a cylindrical prism with multiple antennae and lenses behind reflective shields.

Later, he writes

Tolland clicked open the photo, revealing an exceptionally ugly shrimplike creature with whiskers and fluroescent pink antennae

but in the same book he also has

He put his fingers over his head like two antennas, crossed his eyes, and wagged his tongue like some kind of insect.

Brown is a well known American author, but is not following the supposed American convention. This is no mistake. Clearly, at least in Brown's eyes, the distinction in the form of the plural is not between biological and electrical usage, but between formal and informal usage.

Wikipedia

[edit]

There is no prescription, or even recommendation, on the form of the plural of antenna in the Wikipedia Manual of Style. Given that there is no evidence from real usage that there is a proscription on the form antennae being used in a radio context, then Wikipedia should not have such a proscription. Unless there is some policy based cause to make the change, the spelling used by the original author of an article should be left to stand. This is the same principle that is applied to other formatting issues such as spelling (WP:ENGVAR) and dates (WP:DATERET).

The Wikipedia:Manual of style at Retaining existing styles notes that there is often more than one acceptable style and that the Arbitration Committee has ruled that editors should not change an article from one styling to another without "substantial reason".

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