indexes

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of index.

   Library catalogs once relied on printed indexes to locate materials.

   The report compared several stock market indexes over the past decade.

   Note

   One plural covers every kind of index: the alphabetical listing at the back of a book, the pointer on a gauge, the pointing-hand symbol in a margin, even forefingers. It competes with the Latin-style indices, which mathematicians and scientists often favor. Yet Richard Feynman's The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1963) sums a tensor "over both indexes," so the English plural is at home in technical prose too.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of index.

   The search engine indexes billions of web pages every day.

   A careful editor indexes the book by subject and by author.

   Note

   The verb takes only the English ending. The Latin-style indices that rivals the noun plural never appears here. This one form serves every meaning of the verb: a careful editor indexes a book, a contract indexes wages to inflation, and a program indexes into an array to fetch a value. With a singular subject in the present tense, indexes is the only correct choice.

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