Australian here; I’ve never heard anyone say ‘platypi’. It’s always ‘platypuses’. On the other hand, the plural of ‘octopus’ can be either ‘octopuses’ or ‘octopi’.

I’ve long wanted it to be octopi but my iPhone and most sources say no. Out of the dictionaries, only Oxford English seems to include but says based on a misunderstanding. Some detail on history here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus under pluralisation

Interestingly:

> Historically, the first plural to commonly appear in English language sources, in the early 19th century, is the latinate form "octopi"

That’s quite late and interesting the “wrong” one was first.

Tasmanian here.

It’s only platypuses if you see more than one at a time, and that’s pretty much never gonna happen ;)

Alas, I live in Sydney and have never even seen one in the wild. Hopefully someday I’ll get the opportunity to go where they live.

Now that you mention it, I'm not sure if I've heard platypi or platypuses more.

You have undoubtedly heard platypuses more often.

I have never seen nor heard anyone write or say “platypi” before now. Some web sleuthing suggests that platypuses is somewhere between 20 and 100 times more common in English.

Your web sleuthing has an American bias. I'm from an English-speaking country but I'm not American.

Are you from the 1830s? https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=platypi%2C+pla...

Platypuses don’t live in North America. Most of the older sources that Google n-gram is pulling from for the above chart are British or Australian.

A substantial proportion of the recent uses of platypi are grammar guides telling people that it should always be spelled platypuses.

Not everyone -- enough people write "octopi", especially when trying to sound literate, which is irritating. As is "viri" or "virii".

If I’m going to be wrong I’ll always go with Octopera.

Fun fact: the plural of applepus is apple pie!

with vanilla ice cream

Who's saying octopuses instead of octopi? It might wrong, but it's succinct wrong.

You're missing a word, but it seems like you're saying octopuses is wrong. But it's right, and not just because a spot informal weird had been accepted: it's technically correct. As sibling comments have said, the original plural would be octopodes because it's from the Greek, not octopi because it's not from Latin, but English doesn't normal take Greek plurals.

Apparently the majority of English speakers say octopuses (which is my preference as well, but I'm not a native speaker).

By the way, how do you pronounce octopi? Is it "octo-pee" or "octo-pie"?

pie