Interestingly enough they even made their way up from Africa and were scattered across Europe and Asia. If you look back through history, there used to be many species of hippos roaming Africa. This was was an alternative word from the Greek “hippos potamios” which meant riverine horse. The word moves from Greek to Latin before it was used in the English language. The first time that you can see the English word hippopotamus being used was back in 1542. English speakers sometimes stick closely to the original root language and other times just use a more Anglicized plural. In the English language, there is a lot of flip-flopping back and forth with how we pluralize ancient Greek and Latin nouns.
So therefore, the correct plural of hippopotamus is not hippopotami. The correct form of octopus, if we wanted to stick to the root language’s rules for pluralization would be octopode. This is similar to the plural form of octopus being octopuses, although many believed and taught that octopi was the correct form, they incorrectly tried to tie it to a Latin word with a Latin plural when it also was a Greek word originally. Since the word hippopotamus comes from Greek instead of Latin, the correct pluralization would be hippopotamuses.
Any of a family (Hippopotamidae) of very large, four-toed, chiefly aquatic, herbivorous artiodactyl mammals having a very large head and mouth, nearly hairless thick grayish skin, long lower canine teeth, and relatively short legs, and including two living species:.What Is the Definition of the Word Hippopotamus
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