Warning: Grammatical nonsense ahead!
The plural of bus is…?
According to dictionary.com, it can be either buses or busses. When copy and pasting an assignment for my writing class from MS Word to Firefox, my browser gave me the dreaded spell check underline for a misspelling; I had written “busses”.
When I typed out the assignment in Microsoft Word, busses wasn’t highlighted. But Firefox flagged it. You can imagine my confusion. Good in Word, bad in Firefox. And I can see why that is now. The dictionary can’t make up it’s mind either.
I immediately looked up the word in my dictionary (which I use for everything from essays to instant messaging to leaving hand written notes for people). It confirms:
bus (bÅs) 
n., pl. bus·es or bus·ses.
Why do I care, you ask? Because this is the sort of explanatory nonsense that keeps me awake at night. Not to mention, grammar is important when submitting things for review. I tried to google an answer of why this can be… why a dictionary would give two choices for a spelling… why two different spell checkers disagree about what is right or wrong… but my search produced nothing. I can’t find an answer. Maybe you can?
Because I couldn’t find an answer that satisfied me, I rewrote my submission so that it didn’t require the plural form of bus. It’s a sad day when I lose a bit of faith in my beloved dictionary.
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Comments
I get this all the time. Even when applications are customised to my country. I wouldn’t worry about it. After all, it’s the intellectual content of your work, not the grammatical nuances that make it good or not.
Have faith in what you write and this crap will sort itself out.
Mommo on 
Skitz M. Jones on 
Acai Berry on 
Ms. Babble on 
my submission: busses’s. heh.