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An apostrophe ( ’ ) is a punctuation and sometimes diacritic mark in languages written in the
Latin alphabet. In English, it marks omissions, forms the possessive, and, in special cases, forms plurals.
English language usage
- An apostrophe is commonly used to indicate omitted letters as in:
- An apostrophe is used with an added s to indicate possession, as in Oliver's army, Elizabeth's
crown.
- An apostrophe is used by some writers to form a plural for
abbreviations and symbols where adding just s rather than ’s would be ambiguous, such as mind your p's and
q's. It isn't necessary where there isn't any ambiguity, so CDs not CD's, videos not video's,
1960s not 1960's.
Things to note
- The apostrophe in it's marks a contraction of it is or it has. The possessive its has no
apostrophe. Many find this confusing. (It might help to remember that there is no apostrophe in any of his, hers,
or its.)
- Likewise, its role in pluralization of symbols has led to a modern tendency to use
the apostrophe incorrectly to form plurals of words, that is plural's of word's, such as the movie title Dating Do's and Don'ts in which the first apostrophe is
erroneous.
- When the noun is plural and already ends in s, no extra s is added in the possessive, so pens' lids
(where there is more than one pen) rather than pens's lids. If the plural noun doesn't end in s, then add s
as usual: children's hats.
- If a name already ends with an s, the extra s is sometimes dropped: Jesus' parables. This is more common
in U.S. usage and with classical names (Eros' statue, Herodotus' book). Additionally, many contemporary names that
end with -es (a -z sound) will see the extra s dropped by some writers: Charles' car, though
most style guides advocate Charles's car. Some authors also extend the rule to words ending in -x, -z, or
-ce.
- Who's means who is or who has. The possessive of who is whose. "The person whose
responsibility it is is the member who's oldest."
- You're means you are. This is different from the possessive your. "Your nuts" implies the nuts belong to
you. "You're nuts" would mean "You are nuts". Similarly, "You're going" means "You are going". "Your going" refers to the act of
going, similar to "his going". "You're going to Mexico. Your going will be helpful to the company."
It's worth bearing in mind that some placenames may break this rule: whilst London
contains St James's Park (as James is a singular word ending in S, not a plural), Edinburgh contains
Princes Street, which would ordinarily take an apostrophe but, here,
does not.
Tip
To check you've got it right, swap the sentence around so that the part before the apostrophe becomes the last word. If the
sense hasn't changed, you've got it right.
- Pens’ lids becomes lids of the pens.
- Boy's hats becomes hats of the boy.
- Boys' hats becomes hats of the boys.
- Children's hats becomes hats of the children.
- Two weeks' notice becomes notice of two weeks.
- One week's notice becomes notice of one week.
- But childrens' hats becomes hats of the childrens, so must be wrong.
Greengrocers' apostrophes
Wrongly placed apostrophes are known as Greengrocers' apostrophes (or sometimes, humorously, as Greengrocers
apostrophe's), due to the frequent occurrence of hand-written signs on their produce, offering potatoe's,
cabbage's and such like.
Derivation
The use of the apostrophe to note possession in the English
language derived from the genitive case, but is now considered a
clitic.
Alternative meanings
- In the Dutch language, it is used for some plurals, e.g.
foto's, taxi's
- In certain languages, the apostrophe can serve as diacritic mark.
- In the Belarusian and Ukrainian languages, the apostrophe is used between a consonant and the following "soft" (iotified) vowel (е, ё, є, ю, я) to indicate that no
palatalization of the preceding consonant takes place, and the vowel is
pronounced in the same way as at the beginning of the word. The same function is served by the hard sign in some other Cyrillic alphabets.
- The "normal" apostrophe (') is often used to approximate the prime (used a symbol to indicate measurement in feet or arcminutes); the right single quotation
mark apostrophe is less appropriate in this context.
- In some languages it represents the glottal stop (as in Hawai'i,
see ‘okina) or similar sounds in the Turkic language and in romanizations of Arabic languages. Sometimes this function is performed by the opening single
quotation mark.
Computers and Unicode
In computing, the "normal" apostrophe (') (apostrophe or
apostrophe-quote) corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 39, or U+0027. The (preferred) apostrophe ’ (right single quotation mark
or single comma quotation mark) corresponds to Unicode character U+2019.
The difference between the two is great: U+0027 can be used to represent many different characters, such as a punctuation
mark, a left single quotation mark, an apostrophe, a prime, etc. U+2019 always represent an apostrophe, or a right single
quotation mark.
From the Unicode 2.1 standard:
- U+02BC modifier letter apostrophe is preferred where the character is to represent a modifier letter (for example, in
transliterations to indicate a glottal stop). In the latter case, it is also referred to as a letter apostrophe.
- U+2019 right single quotation mark is preferred where the character is to represent a punctuation mark, as in "We’ve
been here before." In the latter case, U+2019 is also referred to as a punctuation apostrophe. [1] (http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr8/#Apostrophe%20Semantics%20Errata)
An apostrophe for punctuation should be drawn with a light curl (resembling an upsidedown comma), but U+0027 is nearly always drawn as a straight vertical
line, and Unicode actually defines it must be drawn as such. U+2019 has the correct curl.
However, most digital documents use the "normal" apostrophe everywhere. The main reason for this is that on the character '
can be easily typed with any keyboard, whereas typing ’ typically requires a special input method. The "normal" apostrophe
is also preferred for compatibility reasons, because ’ is not in the same position (or even present) in all the many
different 8-bit character encodings in use across the world,
nor is it present in 7-bit ASCII. For writing apostrophes in webpages there is an
application known as SmartyPants (http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/) that converts ASCII apostrophes (') into
proper ones (’).
External links
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