The apostrophe ( ’ or ' ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet or certain other alphabets. In English it has two main functions: it marks omissions, and it assists in marking the possessives of all nouns and many pronouns. (In strictly limited cases, it is allowed to assist in marking plurals, but most authorities now disapprove of such usage; see below.) According to the OED, the word comes ultimately from Greek ἡ ἀπόστροφος [προσῳδία] (hē apóstrophos [prosōidía], "[the accent of] 'turning away', or elision"), through Latin and French.[1]
The apostrophe is different from the closing single quotation mark (usually rendered identically but serving a quite different purpose), and from the similar-looking prime (which is used to indicate measurement in feet or arcminutes, and for various mathematical purposes).
An apostrophe is used in English to indicate possession. The practice ultimately derives from the Old English genitive case: the "of" case, itself used as a possessive in many languages. The genitive form of many nouns ended in the letters -es, which evolved into a simple -s for the possessive ending. An apostrophe was later added to mark the omitted e.[2]
For most singular nouns the ending 's is added; e.g., the cat's whiskers.
When the noun is a normal plural, with an added s, no extra s is added in the possessive; so pens' caps (where there is more than one pen) is correct rather than pens's caps.
Compound nouns have their singular possessives formed with an apostrophe and an added s, in accordance with the rules given above: the Attorney-General's husband; the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports' prerogative; this Minister for Justice's intervention; her father-in-law's new wife.
If the word or compound includes, or even ends with, a punctuation mark, an apostrophe and an s are still added in the usual way: Awaye!'s Paulette Whitten recorded Bob Wilson's story;[7] Washington, D.C.'s museums,[8] assuming that the prevailing style requires full stops in D.C.
An apostrophe is used in time and money references, among others, in constructions such as one hour's respite, two weeks' holiday, a dollar's worth, five pounds' worth, one mile's drive from here. This is like an ordinary possessive use. For example, one hour's respite means a respite of one hour (exactly as the cat's whiskers means the whiskers of the cat). Exceptions are accounted for in the same way: three months pregnant (in modern usage, we do not say pregnant of three months).
No apostrophe is used in the following possessive pronouns and adjectives: yours, his, hers, ours, its, theirs, and whose. (Many people wrongly use it's for the possessive of it, but authorities are unanimous that it's can only be a contraction of it is or it has.) All other possessive pronouns ending in s do take an apostrophe: one's; everyone's; somebody's, nobody else's, etc. With plural forms, the apostrophe follows the s, as with nouns: the others' husbands (but compare They all looked at each other's husbands, in which both each and other are singular).
Each of these four phrases (listed in Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct) has a distinct meaning:
Kingsley Amis, on being challenged to produce a sentence whose meaning depended on a possessive apostrophe, came up with[citation needed]:
This subsection deals with singular nouns pronounced with a sibilant sound at the end: /s/ or /z/. The spelling of these ends with -s, -se, -z, -ze, -ce, -x, or -xe.
Many respected sources have required that practically all singular nouns, including those ending with a sibilant sound, have possessive forms with an extra s after the apostrophe. Examples include the Modern Language Association and The Economist.[9] Such sources would demand possessive singulars like these: Senator Jones's umbrella; Mephistopheles's cat. On the other hand, some modern writers omit the extra s in all cases, and Chicago Manual of Style allows this as an "alternative practice".[10] Generally, Chicago Manual of Style is in line with the majority of current guides, and recommends the traditional practice but provides for several exceptions to accommodate spoken usage, including the omission of the extra s after a polysyllabic word ending in a sibilant.[11] Rules that modify or extend the standard principle have included the following:
Similar examples of notable names ending in an s that are often given a possessive apostrophe with no additional s include Dickens and Williams. There is often a policy of leaving off the additional s on any such name, but this can prove problematic when specific names are contradictory (for example, St James' Park in Newcastle [the football ground] and the area of St. James's Park in London). For more details on practice with geographic names, see the relevant section below.
Some writers like to reflect standard spoken practice in cases like these with sake: for convenience' sake, for goodness' sake, for appearance' sake, for compromise' sake, for peace' sake, etc. This punctuation is preferred in major style guides. Others prefer to add 's: for convenience's sake.[17] Still others prefer to omit the apostrophe when there is an s sound before sake: for morality's sake, but for convenience sake.[18]
The English possessive of French nouns ending in a silent s, x, or z is rendered differently by different authorities. Some prefer Descartes' and Dumas', while others insist on Descartes's and Dumas's. Certainly a sibilant is pronounced in these cases; the theoretical question is whether the existing final letter is sounded, or whether s needs to be added. Similar examples with x or z: Sauce Périgueux's main ingredient is truffle; His pince-nez's loss went unnoticed; "Verreaux('s) eagle, a large, predominantly black eagle, Aquila verreauxi,..." (OED, entry for "Verreaux", with silent x; see Verreaux's eagle); in each of these some writers might omit the added s. The same principles and residual uncertainties apply with "naturalised" English words, like Illinois and Arkansas.[19]
For possessive plurals of words ending in silent x, z, or s, the few authorities that address the issue at all typically call for an added s, and require that the apostrophe precede the s: The Loucheux's homeland is in the Yukon; Compare the two Dumas's literary achievements.[20] The possessive of a cited French title with a silent plural ending is uncertain: "Trois femmes's long and complicated publication history",[21] but "Les noces' singular effect was 'exotic primitive'..." (with nearby sibilants -ce- in noces and s- in singular).[22] Compare treatment of other titles, above.
Guides typically seek a principle that will yield uniformity, even for foreign words that fit awkwardly with standard English punctuation.
United States place names generally do not use the possessive apostrophe. The United States Board on Geographic Names, which has responsibility for formal naming of municipalities and geographic features, has deprecated the use of possessive apostrophes since 1890. Only five names of natural features in the U.S. are officially spelled with a genitive apostrophe (one example being Martha's Vineyard[23]). On the other hand, Britain has Bishop's Stortford, Bishop's Castle and King's Lynn (but St Albans, St Andrews and St Helens) and, while Newcastle United play at St James' Park, and Exeter City at St James Park, London has a St James's Park (this whole area of London is named after St James's Church, Piccadilly[24]). The special circumstances of the latter case may be this: the customary pronunciation of this place name is reflected in the addition of an extra -s; since usage is firmly against a doubling of the final -s without an apostrophe, this place name has an apostrophe. This could be regarded as an example of a double genitive: it refers to the park of the church of St James. None of this detracts from the fact that omission of the apostrophe in geographical names is becoming a clear standard in most English-speaking countries, including Australia.[25] Practice in Britain and Canada is not so uniform.[26]
Sometimes the apostrophe is omitted in the names of clubs, societies, and other organizations, even though the standard principles seem to require it: Country Women's Association, but International Aviation Womens Association; Magistrates' Court of Victoria,[27] but Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union. Usage is variable and inconsistent. Style guides typically advise consulting an official source for the standard form of the name; some tend towards greater prescriptiveness, for or against such an apostrophe.[28] As the case of womens shows, it is not possible to analyse these forms simply as non-possessive plurals, since women is the only correct plural form of woman.
Where a business name is based on a family name, it may or may not take an apostrophe (compare Sainsbury's and Harrods), though in recent times there has been an increasing tendency to drop the apostrophe. Names based on a first name are more likely to take an apostrophe (Joe's Crab Shack). A small activist group called the Apostrophe Protection Society[29] has campaigned for large retailers such as Harrods, Currys and Selfridges to reinstate their missing punctuation. A spokesperson for Barclays PLC stated, "It has just disappeared over the years. Barclays is no longer associated with the family name."[30]
An apostrophe is commonly used to indicate omitted characters:
An apostrophe is used by some writers to form a plural for abbreviations, acronyms, and symbols where adding just s rather than 's may leave things ambiguous or inelegant. Some specific cases:
Names that are not strictly native to English sometimes have an apostrophe substituted to represent other characters (see also As a mark of elision, below).
In transliterated foreign words, an apostrophe may be used to separate letters or syllables that otherwise would likely be interpreted incorrectly. For example:
Furthermore, an apostrophe may be used to indicate a glottal stop in transliterations. For example:
Incorrect use of the apostrophe (according to the generally accepted rules) is endemic, and the perceived abuse of the punctuation mark generates heated debate. 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".[36] A 2004 report by OCR, a British examination board, stated that "the inaccurate use of the apostrophe is so widespread as to be almost universal".[37] A 2008 survey found that nearly half of the UK adults polled were unable to use the apostrophe correctly.[38]
Misused apostrophes are often referred to as "greengrocers' apostrophes", "rogue apostrophes" or "idiot's apostrophes" (a literal translation of the German word Deppenapostroph which criticises the misapplication of apostrophes (Denglisch).
Apostrophes used incorrectly to form plurals are known as greengrocers' apostrophes (or grocers' apostrophes, or sometimes humorously greengrocers apostrophe's). The practice comes from the identical sound of the plural and possessive forms of most English nouns. It is often considered a form of hypercorrection coming from a widespread ignorance of the proper use of the apostrophe or of punctuation in general. Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, points out that before the 19th century, it was standard orthography to use the apostrophe to form a plural of a foreign-sounding word that ended in a vowel (e.g., banana's, folio's, logo's, quarto's, pasta's, ouzo's) to clarify pronunciation. Truss says this usage is no longer considered proper in formal writing.[39]
It is believed that the term was 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 1/6d a pound). Some have argued that its use in mass communication by employees of well-known companies has led to the less grammatically able assuming it to be correct and adopting the habit themselves.[40]
The same error is sometimes made by non-native speakers of English and this hyperforeignism has been formalised in some pseudo-anglicisms. For example, the French word pin's (from English pin) is used (with the apostrophe in both singular and plural) for collectable lapel pins. Similarly, there is an Andorran football club called FC Rànger's (after such British clubs as Rangers F.C.) and a Japanese pop punk band called the Titan Go King's.[41]
The widespread use of apostrophes before the s of plural nouns has led some to believe that an apostrophe is also needed before the s of the third-person present tense of a verb. Thus, he take's, it begin's, etc...
While the greengrocers' apostrophe is more likely to be found in small retail businesses, the UK's largest supermarket chain, Tesco, has a habit of omitting the mark where it should be included. Its in-store signage advertises (among other items) mens magazines, girls toys, kids books and womens shoes. The author Bill Bryson lambastes Tesco for this reason in his book Troublesome Words, stating that "the mistake is inexcusable and those who make it are linguistic Neanderthals".[42]
George Bernard Shaw, a proponent of English spelling reform on phonetic principles, argued that the apostrophe was mostly redundant. He did not use it for spelling cant or hes when writing Pygmalion. He did however allow I'm and it's.[43] Lewis Carroll made greater use of apostrophes, and frequently used sha'n't.[44] Neither author's use has become widespread.
The British pop group Hear'Say famously made unconventional use of an apostrophe in its name. Truss comments that "the naming of Hear'Say in 2001 was [...] a significant milestone on the road to punctuation anarchy".[45] Dexys Midnight Runners, on the other hand, omit the apostrophe.
An apostrophe wrongly thought to be misused in popular culture occurs in the name of Liverpudlian rock band The La's. This apostrophe is often thought to be a mistake; but in fact it marks omission of the letter d. The name comes from the Scouse slang for "The Lads".
In many languages, especially European languages, the apostrophe is used to indicate the elision of one or more sounds, as in English.
Some languages use the apostrophe to separate the root of a word and its affixes, especially if the root is foreign and unassimilated. (For another kind of morphemic separation see pinyin, below.)
Some languages and transliteration systems use the apostrophe to mark the presence, or the lack of, palatalization.
Other languages and transliteration systems use the apostrophe or some similar mark to indicate a glottal stop, sometimes considering it a letter of the alphabet:
The apostrophe represents sounds resembling the glottal stop in the Turkic languages and in romanizations of Arabic. Sometimes this function is performed by the opening single quotation mark.
The form of the apostrophe originates in manuscript writing, as a point with a downwards tail curving clockwise. This form was inherited by the typographic (or typeset) apostrophe ( ’ ), also called the curly apostrophe. Later sans-serif typefaces had stylized apostrophes with a more geometric or simplified form, but usually retaining the same directional bias as a closing quotation mark.
With the invention of the typewriter, a "neutral" quotation mark form ( ' ) was created to economize on the keyboard, by using a single key to represent the apostrophe, both opening and closing single quotation marks, and single primes. This is known as the typewriter apostrophe or vertical apostrophe.
Although ubiquitous in typeset material, the typographic apostrophe ( ’ ) is rather difficult to enter on a computer since it does not have its own key on a standard keyboard. Outside the world of professional typesetting and graphic design, many people do not know how to enter this character and instead use the typewriter apostrophe ( ' ). However, because typewriter apostrophes are now often automatically converted to typographic apostrophes by wordprocessing and desktop-publishing software (see below), the typographic apostrophe does often appear in documents produced by non-professionals.
The typewriter apostrophe has always been considered tolerable on Web pages because of the egalitarian nature of Web publishing and the low resolution of computer monitors in comparison to print. More recently, the correct use of the typographic apostrophe is becoming more common on the Web due to the wide adoption of the Unicode text encoding standard, near-universal Web-browser support, higher-resolution displays, and advanced anti-aliasing of text in modern operating systems. With the spread of Unicode support in computer operating systems and Internet software, the typographic apostrophe can be used nearly anywhere. Nevertheless, the tradition of using the typewriter apostrophe continues in most situations. The majority of English Wikipedia articles use it; and it is currently recommended, along with straight quotation marks ( " " and ' ' ), by Wikipedia's Manual of Style (WP:MOS) – an increasingly influential resource for style.[50]
To make typographic apostrophes easier to enter, wordprocessing and publishing software often converts typewriter apostrophes to typographic apostrophes during text entry (at the same time converting opening and closing single and double quotes to their correct left-handed or right-handed forms). A similar facility may be offered on web servers after submitting text in a form field, e.g. on weblogs or free encyclopedias. 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.
Such conversion is not always done in accordance with the standards for character sets and encodings. Additionally, many such software programs incorrectly convert a leading apostrophe to an opening quotation mark (e.g., in abbreviations of years: ‘29 rather than the correct ’29 for the year 2029; or ‘twas instead of ’twas as the archaic abbreviation of it was. A quick way to get the correct result in Microsoft Word is to type two apostrophes (sometimes using a space as well, as required), and then delete the first. Smart quote features also often fail to recognise situations when a prime rather than an apostrophe is needed; for example, incorrectly rendering the latitude 49° 53′ 08″ as 49° 53’ 08”.
In Microsoft Word it is possible to turn smart quotes off (in some versions, by navigating through Tools, AutoCorrect, AutoFormat as you type, and then checking the appropriate option). Alternatively, typing CONTROL-Z (for Undo) immediately after entering the apostrophe will convert it back to a straight apostrophe.
The typewriter apostrophe ( ' ) was inherited by computer keyboards, and is the only apostrophe character available in the (7-bit) ASCII character encoding, which is the original basis for the computer representation of the Latin alphabet.
As such, it is a highly overloaded character. In ASCII, it represents a right single quotation mark, left single quotation mark, apostrophe, vertical line or prime (punctuation marks), or an apostrophe modifier or acute accent (modifier letters). (The separate ASCII grave accent ( ` ), intended as a modifier and assigned its own key on many keyboards, has sometimes found a non-standard role as a single opening quote.)
Support for the typographic apostrophe ( ’ ) was introduced in a variety of 8-bit character encodings, such as the Apple Macintosh operating system's Mac Roman character set (in 1984), and later in the CP1252 encoding of Microsoft Windows.
Older 8-bit character encodings, like Windows CP1252, Mac Roman or ISO-8859-1, universally support the typewriter quote in the same position, 39, inherited from ASCII (as does Unicode; see below). However, most of them place the typographic apostrophe in different positions. ISO-8859-1, a common encoding used for web pages, omits the typographic apostrophe altogether.
Microsoft Windows CP1252 (sometimes incorrectly called ANSI or ISO-Latin) is a duplicate of ISO-8859-1, with 27 additional characters in the place of control characters (in the range from 128 to 159). Microsoft software usually treats ISO-8859-1 as if it were CP1252. The wide adoption of Microsoft's web browser and web server has forced many other software makers to adopt this as a de facto convention – in some cases contravening established standards unnecessarily (e.g., some applications use CP1252 character values in HTML numeric references, where Unicode values are required, and would be sufficient for interoperation with MS software). Consequently, the typographic apostrophe and several other characters are handled inconsistently by web browsers and other software, and can cause interoperation problems.
There are several types of apostrophe character in Unicode:
The Nenets language has single and double letter apostrophes:
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