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 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”.
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.
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).
ASCII encoding
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.
General principles for the possessive apostrophe
No other punctuation mark causes so muchbewilderment, or is so often misused. Use apostrophes for contraction or possession in each sentence. Complete this activity to show off your understanding of apostrophes for possession. Complete this activity to show your understanding of apostrophes for contraction.
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.
Possessives in geographic names
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.
Contractions are generally considered to be informal. New items will be added, and current items may change. Contractions are common in speaking and in informal writing. Maintained by the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex The chicken road game word ‘its’ or ‘it’s’ can be very tricky.
- This is known as a contraction and the apostrophe in this case shows where the letters ha have been removed.
- The British pop group Hear’Say famously made unconventional use of an apostrophe in its name.
- Truss says this usage is no longer considered proper in formal writing.
- 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”).
The apostrophe (‘) is the most troublesome punctuation mark in English, andperhaps also the least useful. Sometimes, you will need to rearrange the letters a bit when you contract the words. But…by hunting out the right letters, the new word is shorter and faster to say. The apostrophe takes the place of the removed letters.
Adrian Room, in his English Journal article “Axing the Apostrophe”, argued that apostrophes are unnecessary, and context will resolve any ambiguity. Lewis Carroll made greater use of apostrophes, and frequently used sha’n’t, with an apostrophe in place of the elided ll as well as the more usual o. George Bernard Shaw, a proponent of English spelling reform on phonetic principles, argued that the apostrophe was mostly redundant. UK supermarket chain Tesco omits the mark where standard practice would require it. A 2008 survey found that nearly half of the UK adults polled were unable to use the apostrophe correctly.
- Because of the very close similarity of the typewriter apostrophe and typewriter double quote to prime and double prime, substitution in informal contexts is ubiquitous but they are deprecated in contexts where proper typography is important.
- For example, in Dutch, the apostrophe is inserted before the s when pluralising most words ending in a vowel or y for example, baby’s (English babies) and radio’s (English radios).
- The inflection of both is normally preferred (e.g. Jack’s and your dogs), but there is a tendency to avoid this construction, too, in favour of a construction that does not use a coordinate possessive (e.g. by using “Jack’s letters and yours”).
- Most respected authorities recommend that practically all singular nouns, including those ending with a sibilant sound, have possessive forms with an extra ⟨s⟩ after the apostrophe so that the spelling reflects the underlying pronunciation.
Because typewriter apostrophes are now often automatically converted to punctuation apostrophes by word processing and similar software, the punctuation apostrophe routinely appears in documents produced by non-professionals (albeit sometimes incorrectly—see § Smart Quotes below). In ASCII, it is used to represent a punctuation mark (such as right single quotation mark, left single quotation mark, apostrophe punctuation, vertical line, or prime) or a modifier letter (such as apostrophe modifier or acute accent). This is the form of the modern punctuation apostrophe (’), (which is also known informally as the typeset apostrophe, the typographic apostrophe or the curly apostrophe) and of the right single quotation mark. The Geographical Names Board of New South Wales, Australia, excludes possessive apostrophes from place names, along with other punctuation.
As a mark of elision
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.
Use in forming some plurals
The British pop group Hear’Say famously made unconventional use of an apostrophe in its name. Some have argued that its use in mass communication by employees of well-known companies has led to the less literate assuming it to be standard and adopting the habit themselves. The term is believed to have been coined in the middle of the 20th century by a teacher of languages working in Liverpool, at a time when such mistakes were common in the handwritten signs and advertisements of greengrocers (e.g., Apple’s 1/- a pound, Orange’s 1/6 a pound).
Most respected authorities recommend that practically all singular nouns, including those ending with a sibilant sound, have possessive forms with an extra ⟨s⟩ after the apostrophe so that the spelling reflects the underlying pronunciation. By the 18th century, an apostrophe with the addition of an ⟨s⟩ was regularly used for all possessive singular forms, even when the letter ⟨e⟩ was not omitted (as in “the gate’s height”). The plural genitive did not use the “-es” inflection, and since many plural forms already consisted of the “-s” or “-es” ending, using the apostrophe in place of the elisioned ⟨e⟩ could lead to singular and plural possessives of a given word having the exact same spelling. Use apostrophes to form the plural of lowercase letters, abbreviations with periods, and some uppercase letters. Do not use apostrophes for personal pronouns, the relative pronoun who, or for noun plurals.Apostrophes should not be used with possessive pronouns because possessive pronouns already show possession—they do not need an apostrophe. In ASCII, it may be used to represent any of left single quotation mark, right single quotation mark, apostrophe, vertical line or prime (punctuation marks), or an acute accent (modifier letters).
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 modern computing practice, Unicode is the standard and default method for character encoding. Because of the very close similarity of the typewriter apostrophe and typewriter double quote to prime and double prime, substitution in informal contexts is ubiquitous but they are deprecated in contexts where proper typography is important. The apostrophe represents sounds resembling the glottal stop in the Turkic languages and in some romanizations of Semitic languages, including Arabic and Hebrew. In many languages, especially European languages, the apostrophe is used to indicate the elision of one or more sounds, as in English.
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.
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”. George Bernard Shaw called them “uncouth bacilli”, referring to the apostrophe-like shape of many bacteria. Truss comments that “the naming of Hear’Say in 2001 was … a significant milestone on the road to punctuation anarchy”.
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