---
title: Adding/Fixing Plurals and Ordinals
---

# Adding/Fixing Plural and Ordinals

## Adding rules for a locale

- Add the new plural rules to plurals.xml.
- Add the new ordinal rules to ordinals.xml.
- Add the new plural ranges to pluralRanges.xml
- Add the draft minimal pairs to the locale.
- Run the tools below.

## Modifying rules/ranges for a locale

- Normally, you just need to modify the rules in the appropriate file.
- However, if you modify the plural or ordinal categories (adding or removing a category), then make sure all the related files above are consistent.
- Run the tools below.

## Running tools

Whenever you change plural rules, ordinal rules, or plural ranges — _and at the end of the release_ — you must do the following.  The reformatting is required, since it regenerates the samples (after @), which are now necessary for correct functioning of ICU and other clients.

1. Run GeneratePluralRanges.java to reformat pluralRanges.xml
 - Overwrites cldr/common/supplemental/pluralRanges.xml in place.
 - Diff, commit if changed.
2. Run GeneratedPluralSamples to reformat plurals.xml, ordinals.xml.
 - Overwrites cldr/common/supplemental/plurals.xml and cldr/common/supplemental/ordinals.xml in place.
 - Diff, commit if changed.
3. Run GenerateAllCharts (actually, it is enough to run ShowLanguages) and the unit tests.
 - This will insure that the rules are correctly represented, and aligned with the minimal pairs.
 - Diff the plurals chart against the old one: eg against https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/dev/supplemental/language_plural_rules.html
     - NOTE: this step should be replaced by using WritePluralRulesSpreadsheets.java, once that is fixed, 
since diffing HTML is painful, and the dev charts are not always up to date.
     
4. Compare the results carefully, then check in.

## Sample PR
Here is a sample PR: [PR 5569](https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/pull/5569)

## Run WritePluralRulesSpreadsheets.java and diff

For now don't do this step; it needs fixes as per [CLDR-19379](https://unicode-org.atlassian.net/browse/CLDR-19379).