apostrophe
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Key facts
- Punctuation mark.name
- Apostrophe
- Punctuation mark.caption1
- Punctuation apostrophe (serif and sans-serif styles)
- Punctuation mark.caption2
- Typewriter apostrophe (both styles)
via Wikipedia infobox
Article
56 sectionsContents
- Usage in English
- Historical development
- French practice
- Early English practice
- Standardisation
- Possessive apostrophe
- General principles for the possessive apostrophe
- Summary of rules for most situations
- Basic rule (singular nouns)
- <span class="anchor" id="Plural possessive"></span>Basic rule (plural nouns)
- Basic rule (compound nouns)
- Joint or separate possession
- With other punctuation; compounds with pronouns
- Time, money, and similar
- Possessive pronouns and adjectives
- Importance for disambiguation
- <span class="anchor" id="Singular nouns ending with an "s" or "z" sound"></span><span class="anchor" id="Singular nouns ending with an s or z sound"></span> Singular nouns ending with an ⟨s⟩ or ⟨z⟩ sound
- <span class="anchor" id="Nouns ending with silent "s", "x", or "z""></span><span class="anchor" id="Nouns ending with silent s, x, or z"></span>Nouns ending with silent ⟨s⟩, ⟨x⟩, or ⟨z⟩
- Possessives in geographic names
- Possessives in names of organizations
- Possessives in business names
- Apostrophe showing omission
- Use in forming some plurals
- Abbreviations
- Letters of the alphabet, and small words
- Numbers and symbols
- Family names
- Nonstandard use
- Use in non-English names
- Use in transliteration
- Non-standard English use
- <span class="anchor" id="Greengrocers' apostrophe"></span>{{anchor|Greengrocers' apostrophes}}<span class="anchor" id="Greengrocer's apostrophe"></span> Superfluous apostrophes ("greengrocers' apostrophes")
- Omission
- Particular cases
- Criticism
- Non-English use
- As a mark of elision
- As a glottal stop
- As a mark of palatalization or non-palatalization
- To separate morphemes
- Miscellaneous uses in other languages
- Typographic form
- Informal use in measurement and mathematics <span class="anchor" id="Informal use in records of measurement"></span>
- Unicode <span class="anchor" id="punctuation apostrophe"></span>
- Characters similar to apostrophe
- Computing
- ASCII encoding
- Punctuation apostrophe in 8-bit encodings
- Entering apostrophes
- Smart quotes
- Programming
- See also
- Notes and references
- Notes
- References
- Bibliography
The apostrophe (', ') is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for two basic purposes: The marking of the omission of one or more letters, e.g., the contraction of "do not" to "don't" The marking of possessive case of nouns (as in "the eagle's feathers", "in one month's time", "the twins' coats")
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. The same mark is used as a single quotation mark. 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. The word apostrophe comes from the Greek (hē apóstrophos [prosōidía], '[the accent of] turning away or elision'), through Latin and French.