For singular forms, the modern possessive or genitive inflection is a survival from certain genitive inflections in Old English, for which the apostrophe originally marked the loss of the old ⟨e⟩ (for example, lambes became lamb’s). Do not use apostrophes with regular plural nouns that do not show possession. There is no need for apostrophes indicating a plural on capitalized letters, numbers, and symbols (though keep in mind that some editors, teachers, and professors still prefer them).

In Visual Basic (and earlier Microsoft BASIC dialects such as QuickBASIC) an apostrophe is used to denote the start of a comment.note 12 Alternatively, typing Control-Z (for Undo) immediately after entering the apostrophe will convert it back to a typewriter apostrophe. A similar facility may be offered on web servers after submitting text in a form field, e.g. on weblogs or free encyclopedias. Outside the world of professional typesetting and graphic design, most people use the typewriter apostrophe (‘). In Unicode (which practically all vendors have adopted), this apostrophe is encoded as U+2019 ’ RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK. Due to “smart quotes” in Microsoft software converting the ASCII apostrophe to this value, other software makers have been effectively forced to adopt this as a de facto convention.

This is known as a contraction and the apostrophe in this case shows where the letters ha have been removed. Omission means leaving something out, and we often do this with letters or groups of letters in words. Do not put an apostrophe in word ending in s, such as a plural. The same applies to yours, theirs and ours because these are also possessive adjectives of personal pronouns. The apostrophe (Ↄ, ↄ, ’), also known as the apostrophus, is a punctuation mark used in writing. For acronyms, numbers, decades, and words used as words, you can add or omit the apostrophe (just be consistent).

Letters of the alphabet, and small words

The use of elision has continued to the present day, but significant changes have been made to the possessive and plural uses. From the 16th century, following French practice, the apostrophe was used when a vowel letter was omitted either because of incidental elision (“I’m” for “I am”) or because the letter no longer represented a sound (“lov’d” for “loved”). Introduced by Geoffroy Tory (1529), the apostrophe was used in place of a vowel letter to indicate elision (as in l’heure in place of la heure). The word apostrophe comes from the Greek ἡ ἀπόστροφος προσῳδία (hē apóstrophos prosōidía, ‘the accent of turning away or elision’), through Latin and French.

Punctuation marks generally break words; modifier letters generally are considered part of a word. Later sans-serif typefaces had stylised apostrophes with a more geometric or simplified form, but usually retaining the same directional bias as a closing quotation mark. In a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, Geoffrey Pullum proposed that the apostrophe be considered the 27th letter of the alphabet, arguing that it is not a form of punctuation.

A contraction is a word where a letter or two have been left out, largely due to ease of pronunciation. A simple way to remember this rule is the fact that you do not use an apostrophe for the possessive his or hers, so do not do it with its! To use an apostrophe to create a contraction, place an apostrophe where the omitted letter(s) would go. If the noun after “of” is a building, an object, or a piece of furniture, then no apostrophe is needed! I’m afraid, therefore, that, if you find apostrophes difficult, you willjust have to grit your teeth and get down to work.

  • Some style guides state that the apostrophe is unnecessary since there is no ambiguity but that some editors and teachers prefer this usage.
  • It is also substituted informally for other marks – for example instead of the prime symbol to indicate the units of foot or minutes of arc.
  • This case was called the genitive until the 18th century and, like the genitive case in other languages, expresses relationships other than possession.
  • In Microsoft Word for Windows, holding down the Control key while typing two apostrophes will produce a single punctuation apostrophe.

It is also substituted informally for other marks – for example instead of the prime symbol to indicate the units of foot or minutes of arc. It is also used in a few exceptional cases for the marking of plurals, e.g., “p’s and q’s” or Oakland A’s. For other languages and symbol sets (especially in mathematics and science), see below. For a far more comprehensive list of symbols and signs, see List of Unicode characters. Therefore, the correct version is we are open Mondays to Fridays.

Truss says this usage is no longer considered proper in formal writing. A 2004 report by British examination board OCR stated that “the inaccurate use of the apostrophe is so widespread as to be almost universal”. Finally, in “scientific” transliteration of Cyrillic script, the apostrophe usually represents the soft sign ь, though in “ordinary” transliteration it is usually omitted. Furthermore, an apostrophe may be used to indicate a glottal stop in transliterations. For many numbers and symbols, a useful alternative is to write out the numbers as words (e.g. thousands instead of 1000s or 1000’s, and ampersands instead of &s or &’s). While many guides discourage using an apostrophe in all numbers/dates, many other guides encourage using an apostrophe for numbers or are divided on the issue; for example, the Australian Government Style Manual recommends “Binary code uses 0’s and 1’s” but recommends “the 2020s”.

French practice

  • A similar facility may be offered on web servers after submitting text in a form field, e.g. on weblogs or free encyclopedias.
  • It’s always worth checking the apostrophes in a piece of writing, as missing one – or adding one that isn’t needed – is the most commonly made punctuation mistake.
  • The author and language commentator Anu Garg has called for the abolition of the apostrophe, stating “Some day this world would be free of metastatic cancers, narcissistic con men, and the apostrophe”.
  • However, there is a lack of consensus and certainly the use of an apostrophe continues, legitimately, in which “the apostrophe of plurality occurs in the first word but not the second”.

Some business names may inadvertently spell a different name if the name with an ⟨s⟩ at the end is also a name, such as Parson. Modern usage has been influenced by considerations of technological convenience including the economy of typewriter ribbons and films, and similar computer character “disallowance” which tend to ignore past standards. Authorities are now unanimous that it’s can be only a contraction of it is or it has.note 6 Despite this, using it’s as a possessive pronoun is a common grammatical error in present times. The issue of the use of the apostrophe arises when the coordinate construction includes a noun (phrase) and a pronoun. The apostrophe is used in English to indicate what is, for historical reasons, misleadingly called the possessive case in the English language.

Characters similar to apostrophe

But its (without an apostrophe) means ‘belonging to it’, the bird spread its wings. These two words cause confusion because they break the rules! Sometimes we join two words together, like would’ve for would have. The apostrophe shows where this has happened.

Forming plurals of lowercase letters

If you tend to leave out apostrophes, check every word that ends in -s or -es to see if it needs an apostrophe.If you put in too many apostrophes, check every apostrophe to see if you can justify it with a rule for using apostrophes. His, her, its, my, yours, ours are all possessive pronouns.However, indefinite pronouns, such as one, anyone, other, no one, and anybody, can be made possessive. A contraction is a word (or set of numbers) in which one or more letters (or numbers) have been omitted. They are probably right, but unfortunately the apostrophe has not beenabolished yet, and it is a blunt fact that the incorrect use of apostrophes willmake your writing look illiterate more quickly than almost any other kind ofmistake.

It was also frequently used in place of a final ⟨e⟩ (which was still pronounced at the time) when it was elided before a vowel, as in un’ heure. The apostrophe was first used by Pietro Bembo in his edition of De Aetna (1496). To make sure Chrome stays up-to-date, it’s added to your software manager. You need to enter the administrator account password.

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An apostrophe can be used to show that one thing belongs to (or is connected to) something. The apostrophe can be used to show who things belong to. Using contractions like these makes your writing easier to read and more informal. Some words don’t join together so easily. This is how it contracts the two words together. Apostrophes are strange little creatures that can cause two words to merge.

Watch this video to revise apostrophes for contraction. You can just add an apostrophe to show the feet belong to the brothers. This is called a possessive apostrophe.

In Rust, in addition to being used to delimit a character literal, an apostrophe can start an explicit lifetime. In these languages a character is a different object than a one-letter string. This is known as the smart quotes feature; apostrophes and quotation marks that are not automatically altered by computer programs are known as dumb quotes. The Microsoft Windows code page CP1252 (sometimes incorrectly called ANSI or ISO-Latin) contains the punctuation apostrophe at 0x92. Support for the punctuation apostrophe ( ’ ) was introduced in several 8-bit character encodings, such as the original Apple Macintosh operating system’s Mac Roman character set (in 1984), and later in the CP1252 encoding of Microsoft Windows. There is also a risk of an automatic process “correcting” a typewriter apostrophe to a punctuation apostrophe, which results in another variant when a prime symbol was intended.

Plural

It’s always worth checking the apostrophes in a piece of writing, as missing one – or adding one that isn’t needed – is the most commonly made punctuation mistake. Like other possessive pronouns (hers, his, yours, theirs) an apostrophe is not required as they already indicate possession without an apostrophe. For most nouns you just need to add an apostrophe and an s to show that something belongs to a person or thing. The most common mistake in using apostrophes involves the confusion between it’s, which means it is or it has, and its, which is a possessive pronoun. Apostrophes are used to form plurals of letters that appear in lowercase; here the rule appears to be more typographical than grammatical, e.g. “three ps” versus “three p’s.” To form the plural of a lowercase letter, place ‘s after the letter. Brothers is a plural noun that ends in an ‘s’, so you don’t add another ‘s’ after your apostrophe.

For example, the University of Sussex’s online guide notes regional variation in the use of apostrophes in dates, and slightly prefers 1’s and 7’s over 1s and 7s but condones both. Most style guides prefer the lack of apostrophe for groups of years (e.g. 1980s) and will prefer 90s or ’90s over 90’s or ’90’s. In the phrase dos and don’ts, most modern style guides disparage spelling the first word as do’s.

Furthermore, the limited character set provided by computer keyboards has also required practical and pragmatic adjustments. Similarly in mathematics, the prime is generally used to generate more variable names for similar things without resorting to subscripts, with x′ generally meaning something related to (or derived from) x. Similarly, the prime symbol is the formal representation of a minute of arc (1/60 of a degree in geometry and geomatics), and double prime represents a second of arc (for example, 17°54′32″ represents 17 degrees 54 minutes and 32 seconds). Both simplifications carried over to computer keyboards and the ASCII character set.

Possessive apostrophe

The British founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society earned a 2001 Ig Nobel prize for “efforts to protect, promote and defend the differences between plural and possessive”. If chicken road game you have a name that ends in “s,” or if you will observe home-made signs selling tomatoes or chili-and-beans, you will quickly note what can be done with a possessive apostrophe in reckless hands. Rather than ʿ (modifier letter left half ring), the apostrophe is sometimes used to indicate a voiced pharyngeal fricative as it sounds and looks like the glottal stop to most English speakers. The addition of an s without an apostrophe may make the text difficult to read. Some style guides state that the apostrophe is unnecessary since there is no ambiguity but that some editors and teachers prefer this usage. The apostrophe is very often used in plurals of symbols, for example “that page has too many &’s and #’s on it”.