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.
Miscellaneous uses in other languages
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”.
- UK supermarket chain Tesco omits the mark where standard practice would require it.
- 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).
- 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 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”).
- Where a business name is based on a family name it should in theory take an apostrophe, but many leave it out (contrast Sainsbury’s with Harrods).
Possessive apostrophe
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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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.
Possessives in business names
It can be very easy to misuse apostrophes in your writing so follow these rules in order to conquer those common mistakes. Put an apostrophe, or ‘s, at the end of the word instead. Not every problem with apostrophes will result in a communication disaster, but remember that some readers have a zero-tolerance approach to their misuse.
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).
Use in forming some plurals
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 shape of the apostrophe originated in manuscript writing, as a point with a downwards tail curving clockwise. The Apostrophe Protection Society, founded by retired journalist John Richards in 2001, closed in 2019, after a period of 18 years of campaigning for its preservation and correct usage. John C. Wells, emeritus professor of phonetics at University College London, says the apostrophe is “a waste of time”. In his book American Speech, linguist Steven Byington stated of the apostrophe that “the language would be none the worse for its abolition”.
How to check your apostrophes are correct
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 word ‘its’ or ‘it’s’ can be very tricky.
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.
This is known as a contraction and the apostrophe in this case chicken road game 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).
Apostrophes in Contractions
- Sometimes we join two words together, like would’ve for would have.
- 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.
- Names based on a first name are more likely to take an apostrophe, but this is not always the case.
- That dictionary also cites a study that found that only 40% of the possessive forms were used to indicate actual possession.
- I’m afraid, therefore, that, if you find apostrophes difficult, you willjust have to grit your teeth and get down to work.
- If an item belongs to something, the apostrophe shows us who, by sitting at the end of the noun.
This shows that Mittens thinks the magpie belongs to her.Plural nouns work in a similar way. Usually if the noun already ends in s, then the apostrophe just brings itself. If that noun doesn’t end in s, the apostrophe brings one with it.This shows the crown belongs to the magpie. If an item belongs to something, the apostrophe shows us who, by sitting at the end of the noun. First, remind yourself how apostrophes are used for contraction by watching this video. In the Lisp family of programming languages, an apostrophe is shorthand for the quote operator.
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.
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.
Letters of the alphabet, and small words
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.
Some languages use the apostrophe to separate the root of a word and its affixes, especially if the root is foreign and unassimilated. In that case, the letter ‘ayn (Arabic ع and Hebrew ע) is correspondingly transliterated with the opening single quotation mark. In a letter to the English Journal, Peter Brodie stated that apostrophes are “largely decorative … and rarely clarify meaning”. Hubert Selby Jr. used a slash instead of an apostrophe mark for contractions and did not use an apostrophe at all for possessives. In the UK there is a tendency to drop apostrophes in many commonly used names such as St Annes, St Johns Lane, and so on. 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).
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