I’m on vacation this week and somewhere outside of Calgary a license plate holder for the “Maple Leafs” caught my attention—a good reminder that an editor’s eyes never rest! I was instantly curious about the origin of the name, and how the team ended up as Leafs not Leaves.
Thanks to the internet, I learned that the team’s manager changed the name over 90 years ago because a majority of Canadian military regiments in World War I wore a maple leaf badge. While officially named the Toronto Maple Leaf Hockey Club, the team is more commonly referred to as the Maple Leafs.
Aha! This is just a simple application of the often forgotten rule for plurals of proper nouns, which The Chicago Manual of Style (§7.9) summarizes as follows:
Names of persons and other capitalized nouns normally form the plural by adding s or es.
Accordingly, Maple Leaf players are referred to as Maple Leafs, not Maple Leaves. 🤓