The plural was formed by the addition of "_s_:" yet from the infrequent use of the word except in the plural, the singular form has become obsolete, and the same form applies now to both numbers. Those who would apply this reasoning to "News," forget that there is the slight difficulty of the absence of the _noun_ "new" to start from. I do not feel bound to furnish proof of so obvious a fact, that many of the most striking similarities in language are mere coincidences. Words derived from the same root, and retaining the same meaning, frequently present the most dissimilar appearance, as "evêque" and "bishop;" and the most distant roots frequently meet in the same word. When your correspondents, therefore, remind me that there is a French word, _noise_, I must remind them that it contains not one element of our English word. Richardson gives the French word, but evidently discards it, preferring the immediate derivation from "_noy_, that which noies or annoys." I confess I do not understand his argument; but it was referring to this that I said that our only known process would make a plural noun of it. I have an impression that I have met with "annoys" used by poetical license for "annoyances." "Noise" has never been used in the sense of the French word in this country. If derived immediately from the French, it is hardly probable that it should so entirely have lost every particle of its original meaning. With us it is either _a loud sound_, or _fame, report, rumour_, being in this sense rendered in the Latin by the same two words, _fama, rumor_, as News. The former sense is strictly consequential to the latter, which I believe to be the original signification, as shown in its use in the following passages:-- "At the same time it was noised abroad in the realme" _Holinshed_. Cleopatra, catching but the least noise of this, dies instantly. _Ant. and Cleo._, Act i. Sc. 2. _Cre_. What was his cause of anger? _Ser_. The noise goes, this. _Troil. and Cres._, Act. i. Sc. 2. Whether I or your correspondents be right, will remain perhaps for ever doubtful; but the flight that can discover a relationship between this word and another pronounced[1] as nearly the same as the two languages will admit of, and which gives at all events one sense, if not, as I think, the primary one, is scarcely so eccentric as that which finds the origin of a word signifying a loud sound, and fame, or rumor, in "nisus"; not even _struggle_, in the sense of _contention_, an endeavour an effort, a strain. SAMUEL HICKSON. St. John's Wood, June 15, 1850. [Footnote 1: I do not think it necessary, here, to defend my pronunciation of German; the expressions I now use being sufficient for the purpose of my argument. I passed over CH.'s observation on this subject, because it did not appear to me to touch the question.] * * * * * MORE BORROWED THOUGHTS.