Apostrophe
The apostrophe character is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English it is used for three purposes:
- The marking of the omission of one or more letters.
- The marking of possessive case of nouns.
- The marking of plurals of individual characters.
According to Unicode, the apostrophe is the same character as the closing single quotation mark, although the semantics of this character are "context-dependent". Other substitutes such as and are common due to ambiguous treatment of the apostrophe in early digital typesetting. In informal contexts, the simple typewriter apostrophe is commonly substituted for any of a variety of [|similar marks] and their formal purposes.
Usage in English
Historical development
The apostrophe was first used by Pietro Bembo in his edition of De Aetna. It was introduced into English in the 16th century in imitation of French practice.French practice
Introduced by Geoffroy Tory, the apostrophe was used in place of a vowel letter to indicate elision. It was also frequently used in place of a final e when it was elided before a vowel, as in un' heure. Modern French orthography has restored the spelling une heure.Early English practice
From the 16th century, following French practice, the apostrophe was used when a vowel letter was omitted either because of incidental elision or because the letter no longer represented a sound. English spelling retained many inflections that were not pronounced as syllables, notably verb endings and the noun ending -es, which marked either plurals or possessives. So an apostrophe followed by s was often used to mark a plural, especially when the noun was a loan word.Standardisation
The use of elision has continued to the present day, but significant changes have been made to the possessive and plural uses. By the 18th century, apostrophe + s was regularly used for all possessive singular forms, even when the letter e was not omitted. This was regarded as representing the Old English genitive singular inflection -es. The plural use was greatly reduced, but a need was felt to mark possessive plural. The solution was to use an apostrophe after the plural s. However, this was not universally accepted until the mid-19th century. Plurals not ending in -s keep the -'s marker: children's toys, the men's toiletPossessive apostrophe
The apostrophe is used in English to indicate what is, for historical reasons, misleadingly called the possessive case in the English language. This case was called the genitive until the 18th century and in fact expresses much more than possession. For example, in the expressions "the school's headmaster", "the men's department", and "tomorrow's weather", the school does not own/possess the headmaster, men don't own/possess the department, and tomorrow does not/will not own the weather. Most disagreements about the use of possessive forms of nouns and of the apostrophe are due to the erroneous opinion that a term should not use an apostrophe if it does not express possession.In the words of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage:
This dictionary also cites a study that found that only 40% of the possessive forms were used to indicate actual possession.
The modern spelling convention distinguishes possessive singular forms from simple plural forms, and both of those from possessive plural forms.
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. Until the 18th century, the apostrophe was extensively used to indicate plural forms. Its use for indicating plural "possessive" forms was not standard before the middle of the 19th century.
General principles for the possessive apostrophe
Summary of rules for most situations
- Possessive personal pronouns, serving as either noun-equivalents or adjective-equivalents, do not use an apostrophe, even when they end in s. The complete list of those ending in the letter s or the corresponding sound or but not taking an apostrophe is ours, yours, his, hers, its, theirs, and whose.
- Other pronouns, singular nouns not ending in s, and plural nouns not ending in s all take
's in the possessive: e.g., someone's, a cat's toys, women's. - Plural nouns already ending in s take only an apostrophe after the pre-existing s to form the possessive: e.g., three cats' toys.
Basic rule (singular nouns)
- If a singular noun ends with an s-sound, practice varies as to whether to add or the apostrophe alone. A widely accepted practice is to follow whichever spoken form is judged better: the boss's shoes, Mrs Jones' hat. In many cases, both spoken and written forms differ between writers.
- Acronyms and initialisms used as nouns follow the same rules as singular nouns: e.g., "the TV's picture quality".
Basic rule (plural nouns)
- If the plural is not one that is formed by adding s, an s is added for the possessive, after the apostrophe: children's hats, women's hairdresser, some people's eyes. These principles are universally accepted.
- A few English nouns have plurals that are not spelled with a final s but nevertheless end in an /s/ or a /z/ sound: mice, dice, pence. In the absence of specific exceptional treatment in style guides, the possessives of these plurals are formed by adding an apostrophe and an s in the standard way: seven titmice's tails were found, the dice's last fall was a seven, his few pence's value was not enough to buy bread. These would often be rephrased, where possible: the last fall of the dice was a seven.
Basic rule (compound nouns)
- In such examples, the plurals are formed with an s that does not occur at the end: e.g., attorneys-general. A problem therefore arises with the possessive plurals of these compounds. Sources that rule on the matter appear to favour the following forms, in which there is both an s added to form the plural, and a separate
's added for the possessive: the attorneys-general's husbands; successive Ministers for Justice's interventions; their fathers-in-law's new wives. Because these constructions stretch the resources of punctuation beyond comfort, in practice they are normally reworded: interventions by successive Ministers for Justice. Joint or separate possession
Some grammars make no distinction in meaning between the two forms. Some publishers' style guides, however, make a distinction, assigning the "segregatory" meaning to the form "John's and Mary's" and the "combinatorial" meaning to the form "John and Mary's". A third alternative is a construction of the form "Jack's children and Jill's", which is always distributive, i.e. it designates the combined set of Jack's children and Jill's children.
When a coordinate possessive construction has two personal pronouns, the normal possessive inflection is used, and there is no apostrophe. The issue of the use of the apostrophe arises when the coordinate construction includes a noun and a pronoun. In this case, the inflection of only the last item may sometimes be, at least marginally, acceptable. The inflection of both is normally preferred, but there is a tendency to avoid this construction, too, in favour of a construction that does not use a coordinate possessive. Where a construction like "Jack's and your dogs" is used, the interpretation is usually "segregatory".
With other punctuation; compounds with pronouns
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: "Westward Ho!'s railway station"; "Awaye!- If the word or compound already includes a possessive apostrophe, a double possessive results:
Time, money, and similar
An apostrophe is used in time and money references 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. Exceptions are accounted for in the same way: three months pregnant.Possessive pronouns and adjectives
No apostrophe is used in the following possessive pronouns and adjectives: yours, his, hers, ours, its, theirs, and whose.The possessive of it was originally it's, and it is a common mistake today to write it this way, though the apostrophe was dropped by the early 1800s and authorities are now unanimous that it's can be only 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.
Importance for disambiguation
Each of these four phrases has a distinct meaning:- My sister's friend's investments '
- My sister's friends' investments '
- My sisters' friend's investments '
- My sisters' friends' investments '
- Those things over there are my husband's.
- Those things over there are my husbands'.
- Those things over there are my husbands.
Singular nouns ending with an "s" or "z" sound
Many 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. Examples include Oxford University Press, the Modern Language Association, the BBC and The Economist. Such authorities demand possessive singulars like these: Senator Jones's umbrella; Tony Adams's friend; my boss's job; the US's economy. Rules that modify or extend the standard principle have included the following:
- If the singular possessive is difficult or awkward to pronounce with an added sibilant, do not add an extra s; these exceptions are supported by The Guardian, Yahoo! Style Guide, and The American Heritage Book of English Usage. Such sources permit possessive singulars like these: Socrates' later suggestion; or Achilles' heel if that is how the pronunciation is intended.
- Classical, biblical, and similar names ending in a sibilant, especially if they are polysyllabic, do not take an added s in the possessive; among sources giving exceptions of this kind are The Times and The Elements of Style, which make general stipulations, and Vanderbilt University, which mentions only Moses and Jesus. As a particular case, Jesus
' – referred to as "an accepted liturgical archaism" in Hart's Rules – is commonly written instead of Jesus's.
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. However, debate has been going on regarding the punctuation of St James' Park for some time, unlike St James's Park which is the less contentious version. 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, etc. This punctuation is preferred in major style guides. Others prefer to add
The Supreme Court of the United States is split on whether a possessive singular noun that ends with s should always have an additional s after the apostrophe, sometimes have an additional s after the apostrophe, or never have an additional s after the apostrophe. The informal majority view favoured the additional s, but a strong minority disagrees.
Nouns ending with silent ''s'', ''x'', or ''z''
The English possessive of French nouns ending in a silent s, x, or z is addressed by various style guides. Certainly a sibilant is pronounced in examples like Descartes's and Dumas's; the question addressed here is 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 eagle, a large, predominantly black eagle, Aquila verreauxi,..." ; 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.For possessive plurals of words ending in a silent x, z or s, the few authorities that address the issue at all typically call for an added s and suggest that the apostrophe precede the s: The Loucheux's homeland is in the Yukon; Compare the two Dumas's literary achievements. The possessive of a cited French title with a silent plural ending is uncertain: "Trois femmes
Guides typically seek a principle that will yield uniformity, even for foreign words that fit awkwardly with standard English punctuation.
Possessives in geographic names
Place names in the United States do not use the possessive apostrophe on federal maps and signs. 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 so as not to show ownership of the place. Only five names of natural features in the US are officially spelled with a genitive apostrophe: Martha's Vineyard; Ike's Point, New Jersey; John E's Pond, Rhode Island; Carlos Elmer's Joshua View, Arizona; and Clark's Mountain, Oregon. Some municipalities, originally incorporated using the apostrophe, have dropped it in accordance with this policy; Taylors Falls in Minnesota, for example, was originally incorporated as "Taylor's Falls".Australia's Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping also has a no-apostrophe policy, a practice it says goes back to the 1900s and which is generally followed around the country.
On the other hand, the United Kingdom has Bishop's Stortford, Bishop's Castle and King's Lynn but St Albans, St Andrews and St Helens. London Underground's Piccadilly line has the adjacent stations of Earl's Court in Earls Court and Barons Court. These names were mainly fixed in form many years before grammatical rules were fully standardised. While Newcastle United play football at a stadium called St James' Park, and Exeter City at St James Park, London has a St James's Park.
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. Practice in the United Kingdom and Canada is not so uniform.
Possessives in names of organizations
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 Association; Magistrates' Court of Victoria, 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. As the case of shows, it is not possible to analyze these forms simply as non-possessive plurals, since women is the only correct plural form of woman.Possessives in business names
Where a business name is based on a family name it should in theory take an apostrophe, but many leave it out. 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, but this is not always the case. 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. A small activist group called the Apostrophe Protection Society 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." Further confusion can be caused by businesses whose names look as if they should be pronounced differently without an apostrophe, such as Paulos Circus, and other companies that leave the apostrophe out of their logos but include it in written text, such as Cadwalader's.Apostrophe showing omission
An apostrophe is commonly used to indicate omitted characters, normally letters:- It is used in contractions, such as can't from cannot, it's from it is or it has, and I'll from I will or I shall.
- It is used in abbreviations, as gov't for government. It may indicate omitted numbers where the spoken form is also capable of omissions, as
'70s for 1970s representing seventies for nineteen-seventies. In modern usage, apostrophes are generally omitted when letters are removed from the start of a word, particularly for a compound word. For example, it is not common to write 'bus, 'phone, 'net. However, if the shortening is unusual, dialectal or archaic, the apostrophe may still be used to mark it. Sometimes a misunderstanding of the original form of a word results in a non-standard contraction. A common example: 'til for until, though till is in fact the original form, and until is derived from it. - *The spelling fo'c's'le, contracted from the nautical term forecastle, is unusual for having three apostrophes. The spelling bo's'n's, as in Bo's'n's Mate, also has three apostrophes, two showing omission and one possession. Fo'c's'le may also take a possessive s – as in the fo'c's'le's timbers – giving four apostrophes in one word. A word which formerly contained two apostrophes is sha'n't for shall not, examples of which may be found in the older works of P G Wodehouse and "Frank Richards", but this has been superseded by shan't.
- *Shortenings with more apostrophes, such as y'all'dn't've, are possible, particularly in Southern US dialects.
- It is sometimes used when the normal form of an inflection seems awkward or unnatural; for example, KO'd rather than KOed ; "a spare pince-nez'd man".
- An apostrophe's function as possessive or contractive can depend on the grammatical context:
- *We rehearsed for Friday's opening night.
- *We rehearsed because Friday's opening night.
- Eye dialects use apostrophes in creating the effect of a non-standard pronunciation.
- Apostrophes to omit letters in place names are common on British road signs when space does not allow for the full name.
- The United States Board on Geographic Names, while discouraging possessive apostrophes in place names, allows apostrophes indicating omission, as in "Lake O' the Woods," or when normally present in a surname, as in "O'Malley Draw".
Use in forming some plurals
Use of the apostrophe may be recommended only for lowercase letters. On the other hand, some style manuals and critics suggest that apostrophes should never be used for plurals, even for lower case letters. APA style requires that one write: ps, ns, etc.
An apostrophe is used by some writers to form a plural for abbreviations, initials including acronyms, and symbols, especially where adding just s rather than 's may leave meaning ambiguous or presentation inelegant. Some specific cases:
- For groups of years, most style guides prefer 1960s to 1960's and 90s or
'90s to 90's or '90's. - Several guides discourage using an apostrophe in forming the plural of numbers, for example 1000s of years rather than 1000's of years. An alternative is to write out the numbers as words.
- The apostrophe is often used in plurals of symbols, for example "that page has too many &'s and # 's on it". Some style guides state that the apostrophe is unnecessary since there is no ambiguity but that some editors and teachers prefer this usage. The addition of an s without an apostrophe may make the text difficult to read.
Use in non-English names
Names that are not strictly native to English sometimes have an apostrophe substituted to represent other characters.- Anglicised versions of Irish surnames typically contain an apostrophe after an O, for example O'Doole.
- Some Scottish and Irish surnames use an apostrophe after an M, for example M'Gregor. The apostrophe here may be seen as marking a contraction where the prefix Mc or Mac would normally appear. However, it may also arise from confusion of ‘, which was used as a substitute for superscript c when printing with hand-set metal type. Compare: M'Lean, McLean, M‘Lean.
Use in transliteration
- in the Arabic word mus'haf, a transliteration of rtl=yes, the syllables are as in mus·haf, not mu·shaf
- in the Japanese name Shin'ichi, the apostrophe shows that the pronunciation is shi·n·i·chi, where the letters n and i are separate morae, rather than shi·ni·chi.
- in the Chinese Pinyin romanization, the apostrophe is used before a syllable starting with a vowel in a multiple-syllable word when the syllable does not start the word, unless the syllable immediately follows a hyphen or other dash. This is done to remove ambiguity that could arise, as in Xi'an, which consists of the two syllables xi an, compared to such words as xian.
- in the Arabic word Qur'an, a common transliteration of rtl=yes al-qur'ān, the apostrophe corresponds to the diacritic Maddah over the 'alif, one of the letters in the Arabic alphabet
- in the Arabic word Ka'aba for rtl=yes al-kaʿbah, the apostrophe corresponds to the Arabic letter.
- "The Ob River, also Ob', is a major river in western Siberia,...".
Non-standard English use
Superfluous apostrophes ("greengrocers' apostrophes")
Apostrophes used in a non-standard manner to form noun plurals are known as greengrocers' apostrophes or grocers' apostrophes, often written as greengrocer's apostrophes or grocer's apostrophes. They are sometimes humorously called greengrocers apostrophe's, rogue apostrophes, or idiot's apostrophes. The practice, once common and acceptable, comes from the identical sound of the plural and possessive forms of most English nouns. It is often criticised as 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 to clarify pronunciation. Truss says this usage is no longer considered proper in formal writing.UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson's letter to EU President Donald Tusk of 19 October 2019 regarding a Brexit extension contained a well-publicised and ridiculed grocer's apostrophe. He wrote "in this continent our people's share"
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. 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 same use of apostrophe before noun plural -s forms is sometimes made by non-native speakers of English. 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 and radio's. This often produces so-called "Dunglish" errors when carried over into English. Hyperforeignism has been formalised in some pseudo-anglicisms. For example, the French word :fr:pin's is used for collectible lapel pins. Similarly, there is an Andorran football club called italic=no and a Japanese dance group called Super Monkey's.
Omission
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.UK supermarket chain Tesco omits the mark where standard practice would require it. Signs in Tesco advertise . In his book Troublesome Words, author Bill Bryson lambastes Tesco for this, stating that "the mistake is inexcusable, and those who make it are linguistic Neanderthals."
The United States Board on Geographic Names discourages the use of possessive apostrophes in geographic names, though state agencies do not always conform; Vermont's official state website provides information concerning Camel's Hump State Forest.
The Geographical Names Board of New South Wales, Australia, excludes possessive apostrophes from place names, along with other punctuation.
Particular cases
, a proponent of English spelling reform on phonetic principles, argued that the apostrophe was mostly redundant. He did not use it for spelling cant, hes, etc., in many of his writings. He did, however, allow I'm and it's. Hubert Selby Jr. used a slash instead of an apostrophe mark for contractions and did not use an apostrophe at all for possessives. 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. These authors' usages have not become widespread.Apostrophes in band names
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".The apostrophe in the name of rock band The La's is often thought to be misused, but in fact it marks omission of the letter d. The name comes from the Scouse slang for lads.
Criticism
Over the years, the use of apostrophes has been criticised. George Bernard Shaw called them "uncouth bacilli", referring to the apostrophe-like shape of many bacteria. The author and language commentator Anu Garg, in a humorous but well-argued discussion, 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." In his book American Speech, linguist Steven Byington stated of the apostrophe that "the language would be none the worse for its abolition". Adrian Room, in his English Journal article "Axing the Apostrophe", argued that apostrophes are unnecessary, and context will resolve any ambiguity. In a letter to the English Journal, Peter Brodie stated that apostrophes are "largely decorative... rarely clarify meaning". John C. Wells, emeritus professor of phonetics at University College London, says the apostrophe is "a waste of time". The Apostrophe Protection Society, founded by retired journalist John Richards in 2001, was brought to a full stop in 2019, Richards accepting that "the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won!".The over-use of apostrophes in names in fantasy literature was satirised by Neal Stephenson in Reamde.
Non-English use
As a mark of elision
In many languages, especially European languages, the apostrophe is used to indicate the elision of one or more sounds, as in English.- In Albanian the apostrophe is used to show that a vowel has been omitted from words, especially in different forms of verbs and in some forms of personal pronoun. For example, t'i: them, m'i mori. It is used too in some of the forms of possessive pronouns, for example: s'ëmës.
- In Afrikaans, as in Dutch, the apostrophe is used to show that letters have been omitted from words. The most common use is in the indefinite article 'n, which is a contraction of een meaning 'one'. As the initial e is omitted and cannot be capitalised, the second word in a sentence that begins with 'n is capitalised instead. For example: 'n Boom is groen, 'A tree is green'. In addition, the apostrophe is used for plurals and diminutives where the root ends with long vowels, e.g. foto's, taxi's, Lulu's, Lulu'tjie, etc.
- In Danish, apostrophes are sometimes seen on commercial materials. One might commonly see Ta' mig med next to a stand with advertisement leaflets; that would be written Tag mig med in standard orthography. As in German, the apostrophe must not be used to indicate the possessive, except when there is already an s, x or z present in the base form, as in Esajas' bog.
- In Dutch, as in Afrikaans, the apostrophe is used to indicate omitted characters. For example, the indefinite article een can be shortened to 'n, and the definite article het shortened to 't. When this happens in the first word of a sentence, the second word of the sentence is capitalised. In general, this way of using the apostrophe is considered non-standard, except as genitivus temporalis in 's morgens, 's middags, 's avonds, 's nachts and in some frozen place names such as s-Hertogenbosch, 's-Gravenhage, 's-Gravenbrakel, 's-Hertogenrade, etc. In addition, the apostrophe is used for plurals where the singulars end with long vowels, e.g. foto's, taxi's; and for the genitive of proper names ending with these vowels, e.g. Anna's, Otto's. These are in fact elided vowels; use of the apostrophe prevents spellings like fotoos and Annaas. However, most diminutives do not use an apostrophe where the plural forms would; producing spellings such as fotootje and taxietje.
- In Esperanto, the italic=no limits the elision mark to the definite article l' and singular nominative nouns. This is mostly confined to poetry and songs. Idiomatic phrases such as dank' al and del' are nonetheless frequent. In-word elision is usually marked with a hyphen, as in D-ro. Some early guides used and advocated the use of apostrophes between word parts, to aid recognition of such compound words as gitar'ist'o, 'guitarist'; but in the latter case, modern usage is to use either a hyphen or a middle dot when disambiguation is necessary, as in ĉas-hundo or ĉas·hundo, "a hunting dog", not to be mispronounced as ĉa.ŝun.do.
- In Catalan, French, Italian, Ligurian, and Occitan word sequences such as coup d'état, Maître d'hôtel, L'Aquila and L'Hospitalet de Llobregat the final vowel in the first word is elided because the word that follows it starts with a vowel or a mute h. Similarly, French has qu'il instead of que il, c'est instead of ce est, and so on. Catalan, French, Italian, and Occitan surnames sometimes contain apostrophes of elision, e.g. d'Alembert, D'Angelo
- French feminine singular possessive adjectives do not undergo elision, but change to the masculine form instead: ma preceding église becomes mon église.
- Quebec's Bill 101, which dictates the use of French in the province, prohibits the use of apostrophes in proper names in which it would not be used in proper French.
- Galician language standard admits the use of apostrophe for contractions that normally don't use it but when the second element is a proper noun, mostly a title: o heroe d'A Odisea. They are also used to reproduce oral ellisions and, as stated below, to join commercial names of popular public establishments, namely bars and in masculine, maybe pretending to remind anglicised versions of Irish surnames.
- In Ganda, when a word ending with a vowel is followed by a word beginning with a vowel, the final vowel of the first word is elided and the initial vowel of the second word lengthened in compensation. When the first word is a monosyllable, this elision is represented in the orthography with an apostrophe: in taata w'abaana 'the father of the children', wa becomes w; in y'ani?, ye becomes y. But the final vowel of a polysyllable is always written, even if it is elided in speech: omusajja oyo, not *omusajj'oyo, because omusajja is a polysyllable.
- In German an apostrophe is used almost exclusively to indicate omitted letters. It must not be used for plurals or most of the possessive forms. is widespread, it is often deemed incorrect. The German equivalent of "greengrocers' apostrophes" would be the derogatory Deppenapostroph.
- In modern printings of Ancient Greek, apostrophes are also used to mark elision. Some Ancient Greek words that end in short vowels elide when the next word starts with a vowel. For example, many Ancient Greek authors would write δἄλλος for δὲ ἄλλος and ἆροὐ for ἆρα οὐ. Such modern usage should be carefully distinguished from polytonic Greek's native rough and smooth breathing marks, which usually appear as a form of rounded apostrophe.
- In Hebrew, the geresh, often typed as an apostrophe, is used to denote initialisms. A double geresh, known by the dual form gershayim, is used to denote acronyms; it is inserted before the last letter of the acronym. Examples: פרופ׳ ; נ״ב. The geresh is also used to indicate the elision of a sound; however, this use is much less frequent, and confined to the purpose of imitating a natural, informal utterance, for example: אנ׳לא.
- In Irish, the past tense of verbs beginning with a vowel, or with fh followed by a vowel, begins with d' , for example do oscail becomes d'oscail and do fhill becomes d'fhill. The copula is is often elided to
's, and do, mo etc. are elided before f and vowels. - In Italian it is used for elision with pronouns, as in l'ha instead of la ha, articles, as in l'opera instead of la opera, and for truncation, as in po' instead of poco.
- In modern Norwegian, the apostrophe marks that a word has been contracted, such as ha'kke from ha'kkehar ikke. Unlike English and French, such elisions are not accepted as part of standard orthography but are used to create a more "oral style" in writing. The apostrophe is also used to mark the genitive for words that end in an -s sound: words ending in -s, -x, and -z, some speakers also including words ending in the sound. As Norwegian doesn't form the plural with -s, there is no need to distinguish between an -s forming the possessive and the -s forming the plural. Therefore, we have mann and manns, without apostrophe, but los and los'
. Indicating the possessive for the two former American presidents named George Bush, whose names end in, could be written as both Bushs and Bush. - In Portuguese the apostrophe is also used in a few combinations, such as caixa-d'água, galinha-d'angola, pau-d'alho, etc. Portuguese has many contractions between prepositions and articles or pronouns, but these are written without an apostrophe.
- Modern Spanish no longer uses the apostrophe to indicate elision in standard writing, although it can sometimes be found in older poetry for that purpose. Instead Spanish writes out the spoken elision in full except for the contraction del for de + el, which uses no apostrophe. Spanish also switches to a form that is identical to the masculine article immediately before a feminine noun beginning with a stressed a instead of writing an elision: un águila blanca, el águila blanca, and el agua pura but una/la blanca águila and la pura agua. This reflects the origin of the Spanish definite articles from the Latin demonstratives ille/illa/illum.
- In Swedish, the apostrophe marks an elision, such as på sta'n, short for på staden, to make the text more similar to the spoken language. This is relaxed style, fairly rarely used, and would not be used by traditional newspapers in political articles, but could be used in entertainment related articles and similar. The formal way to denote elision in Swedish is by using colon, e.g. S:t Erik for Sankt Erik which is rarely spelled out in full. The apostrophe must not be used to indicate the possessive except – although not mandatory – when there is already an s, x or z present in the base form, as in Lukas' bok.
- Welsh uses the apostrophe to mark elision of the definite article yr following a vowel, as in i'r tŷ, 'to the house'. It is also used with the particle yn, such as with mae hi'n, 'she is'.
As a glottal stop
- In several Finno-Ugric languages, such as Estonian and Finnish; for example in the Finnish word raa'an, being the genitive or accusative of raaka.
- In Guarani, it is called puso, and used in the words ñe'ẽ, ka'a, a'ỹ.
- In Hawaiian, the okina, an inverted apostrophe, is often rendered as. It is considered a letter of the alphabet.
- Mayan.
- In the Tongan language, the apostrophe is called a fakauʻa and is the last letter of the alphabet. It represents the glottal stop. Like the okina, it is inverted.
- Various other Austronesian languages, such as Samoan, Tahitian, and Chamorro.
- Tetum, one of the official languages of East Timor.
- The Brazilian native Tupi language.
- Mossi, a language of Burkina Faso.
- In Võro, the apostrophe is used in parallel with the letter q as symbol of plural.
- Several fictional languages such as Klingon, D'ni, Mando'a or Na'vi.
As a mark of palatalization or non-palatalization
Some languages and transliteration systems use the apostrophe to mark the presence, or the lack of, palatalization:- In Belarusian and Ukrainian, the apostrophe is used between a consonant and a following "soft" vowel 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. It therefore marks a morpheme boundary before /j/, and in Ukrainian, is a letter of the alphabet rather than a simple punctuation mark in English, as it is not a punctuation mark in Ukrainian. It appears frequently in Ukrainian, as, for instance, in the words: <п'ять> 'five', <від'їзд> 'departure', <об'єднаний> 'united', <з'ясувати> 'to clear up, explain', <п'єса> play, etc.
- In Russian and some derived alphabets, the same function has been served by the hard sign. But the apostrophe saw some use as a substitute after 1918, when Soviet authorities enforced an orthographic reform by confiscating movable type bearing the hard sign from stubborn printing houses in Petrograd.
- In some Latin transliterations of certain Cyrillic alphabets, the apostrophe is used to replace the soft sign, e.g., Русь is transliterated Rus' according to the BGN/PCGN system. Some of these transliteration schemes use a double apostrophe to represent the apostrophe in Ukrainian and Belarusian text, e.g. Ukrainian слов'янське is transliterated as slov"yans'ke.
- Some Karelian orthographies use an apostrophe to indicate palatalization, e.g. n'evvuo, d'uuri, el'vüttiä.
To separate morphemes
- In Danish an apostrophe is sometimes used to join the enclitic definite article to words of foreign origin, or to other words that would otherwise look awkward. For example, one would write IP'en to mean "the IP address". There is some variation in what is considered "awkward enough" to warrant an apostrophe; for instance, long-established words such as firma or niveau might be written firma'et and niveau'et, but will generally be seen without an apostrophe. Due to Danish influence, this usage of the apostrophe can also be seen in Norwegian, but is non-standard – a hyphen should be used instead: e.g. CD-en.
- In Estonian, apostrophes can be used in the declension of some foreign names to separate the stem from any declension endings; e.g., Monet or Monet'sse of Monet.
- In Finnish, apostrophes are used in the declension of foreign names or loan words that end in a consonant when written but are pronounced with a vowel ending, e.g. show'ssa, Bordeaux'hon. For Finnish as well as Swedish, there is a closely related use of the colon.
- In Polish, the apostrophe is used exclusively for marking inflections of words and word-like elements whose spelling conflicts with the normal rules of inflection. This mainly affects foreign words and names. For instance, one would correctly write Kampania Ala Gore'a for "Al Gore's campaign". In this example, Ala is spelled without an apostrophe, since its spelling and pronunciation fit into normal Polish rules; but Gore'a needs the apostrophe, because e disappears from the pronunciation, changing the inflection pattern. This rule is often misunderstood as calling for an apostrophe after all foreign words, regardless of their pronunciation, yielding the incorrect Kampania Al'a Gore'a, for example. The effect is akin to the greengrocers' apostrophe.
- In Turkish, proper nouns are capitalised and an apostrophe is inserted between the noun and any following inflectional suffix, e.g. İstanbul'da, contrasting with okulda and İstanbullu.
- In Welsh the apostrophe is used with infixed pronouns in order to distinguish them from the preceding word.
Miscellaneous uses in other languages
- In Breton, the combination c'h is used for the consonant , while ch is used for the consonant .
- In Czech, an apostrophe is used for writing to indicate spoken or informal language where the writer wants to express the natural way of informal speech, but it should not be used in formal text or text of a serious nature. E.g., instead of četl, the word form čet'
is used. Čet is the informal variant of the verb form četl, at least in some varieties. These two words are the same in meaning, but to use the informal form gives the text a more natural tone, as though a friend were talking to you. Furthermore, the same as in the Slovak case above holds for lowercase t and d, and for the two-digit year notation. - In Finnish, one of the consonant gradation patterns is the change of a k into a hiatus, e.g. keko → keon. This hiatus has to be indicated in spelling with an apostrophe if a long vowel or a diphthong would be immediately followed by the final vowel, e.g. ruoko → ruo'on, vaaka → vaa'an. Similarly, the apostrophe is used to mark the hiatus that occurs in poetry, e.g. miss' on for missä on.
- Galician restaurants sometimes use ' in their names instead of the standard article O.
- In Ganda, ng is used in place of ŋ on keyboards where this character is not available. The apostrophe distinguishes it from the letter combination ng, which has separate use in the language. Compare this with the Swahili usage below.
- In Hebrew, the geresh is used for several purposes other than to mark an elision:
- *As an adjacent to letters to show sounds that are not represented in the Hebrew alphabet: Sounds such as , , and are indicated using ג, ת, and צ with a geresh. For example, the name George is spelled ג׳ורג׳ in Hebrew.
- *To denote a Hebrew numeral
- *To denote a Hebrew letter which stands for itself
- *Gershayim to denote a Hebrew letter name
- *Another use of geresh is to denote the last syllable in some words of Yiddish origin.
- *In the Middle Ages and the Early modern period, gershayim were also used to denote foreign words, as well as a means of emphasis.
- In Italian, an apostrophe is sometimes used as a substitute for a grave or an acute accent. This may be done after an initial E or an accented final vowel, or when the proper form of the letter is unavailable for technical reasons. So a sentence beginning È vero che... may be written as E' vero che.... This form is often seen in newspapers, as it is the only case of an accent above the cap height and its omission permits the text to be more closely spaced. Less commonly, a forename like Niccolò might be rendered as Niccolo, or NICCOLO; perché, as perche, or PERCHE. This applies only to machine or computer writing, in the absence of a suitable keyboard.
- In Jèrriais, one of the uses of the apostrophe is to mark gemination, or consonant length: For example, t't represents, s's, n'n, th'th, and ch'ch .
- In Lithuanian, the apostrophe is occasionally used to add a Lithuanized ending on an international word, e.g.- "parking'as", "Skype'as", "Facebook'as".
- In standard Lojban orthography, the apostrophe is a letter in its own right that can appear only between two vowels, and is phonemically realised as either voiceless glottal fricative| or, more rarely, voiceless dental fricative|.
- In Macedonian the apostrophe is sometimes used to represent the sound schwa, which can be found on dialectal levels, but not in the Standard Macedonian.
- In Slovak, the caron over lowercase t, d, l, and uppercase L consonants resembles an apostrophe, for example, ď, ť, ľ, and Ľ. This is especially so in certain common typographic renderings. But it is non-standard to use an apostrophe instead of the caron. There is also l with an acute accent: ĺ, Ĺ. In Slovak the apostrophe is properly used only to indicate elision in certain words, or hor for hore ); however, these elisions are restricted to poetry. Moreover, the apostrophe is also used before a two-digit year number : '.
- In Swahili, an apostrophe after ng shows that there is no sound of after the sound; that is, that the ng is pronounced as in English singer, not as in English finger.
- In Switzerland, the apostrophe is used as thousands separator alongside the fixed space in all four national languages.
- In the new Uzbek Latin alphabet adopted in 2000, the apostrophe serves as a diacritical mark to distinguish different phonemes written with the same letter: it differentiates o from o, and g from g. This avoids the use of special characters, allowing Uzbek to be typed with ease in ordinary ASCII on any Latin keyboard. In addition, a postvocalic apostrophe in Uzbek represents the glottal stop phoneme derived from Arabic hamzah or ayn, replacing Cyrillic ъ.
- In English Yorkshire dialect, the apostrophe is used to represent the word the, which is contracted to a more glottal /t/ sound. Most users will write in t'barn, on t'step ; and those unfamiliar with Yorkshire speech will often make these sound like intuh barn and ontuh step. A more accurate rendition might be in't barn and on't step, though even this does not truly convey correct Yorkshire pronunciation as the t is more like a glottal stop.
- In the pinyin system of romanization for Standard Chinese, an apostrophe is often loosely said to separate syllables in a word where ambiguity could arise. Example: the standard romanization for the name of the city Xī'ān includes an apostrophe to distinguish it from a single-syllable word ''
Typographic form
With the invention of the typewriter, a "neutral" or "straight" shape quotation mark,, was created to represent a number of different glyphs with a single keystroke: the apostrophe, both the opening and the closing single quotation marks, the single primes, and on some typewriters even the exclamation point. This is known as the typewriter apostrophe or vertical apostrophe. The same convention was adopted for double quotation marks. Both simplifications carried over to computer keyboards and the ASCII character set.
Informal use in records of measurement
Formally, the symbol used to represent a foot of length, depth, or height, is and that for the inch is . (For example, in the USA and UK, the notation signifies 5 feet and 7 inchesUnicode
defines three apostrophe characters:Characters similar to apostrophe:
- Hawaiian okina and for the transliteration of Arabic and Hebrew ʻayn.
- Arabic hamza and Hebrew alef.
- Arabic and Hebrew ʿayin.
- Stress accent or dynamic accent.
- One of two characters for glottal stop in Nenets.
- Also known as combining Greek psili.
- Also known as combining Greek dasia.
- Identical to U+0313.
- Also known as Greek dexia keraia.
- Saltillo of the languages of Mexico.
- Fullwidth form of the typewriter apostrophe.
Computing
ASCII encoding
The typewriter apostrophe was inherited by computer keyboards, and is the only apostrophe character available in the ASCII character encoding, at code value 0x27. As such, it is a highly overloaded character. In ASCII, it represents a left single quotation mark, right single quotation mark, apostrophe, vertical line or prime, or an acute accent.Many earlier computer displays and printers rendered the ASCII apostrophe as a typographic apostrophe, and rendered the ASCII grave accent U+0060 as a matching left single quotation mark. This allowed a more typographic appearance of text:
``I can't'' would appear as on these systems. This can still be seen in many documents prepared at that time, and is still used in the TeX typesetting system to create typographic quotes.Typographic apostrophe in 8-bit encodings
Support for the typographic apostrophe was introduced in several 8-bit character encodings, such as the Apple Macintosh operating system's Mac Roman character set, and later in the CP1252 encoding of Microsoft Windows. Both sets also used this code point for a closing single quote. There is no such character in ISO 8859-1.The Microsoft Windows code page CP1252 contains the typographic apostrophe at 0x92. Due to "smart quotes" in Microsoft software converting the ASCII apostrophe to this value, other software makers have been effectively forced to adopt this as a de facto convention. For instance, the HTML5 standard specifies that this value is interpreted as this character from CP1252. Some earlier non-Microsoft browsers would display a '?' for this and make web pages composed with Microsoft software somewhat hard to read.
Entering apostrophes
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. The typewriter apostrophe has always been considered tolerable on Web pages because of the egalitarian nature of Web publishing, the low resolution of computer monitors in comparison to print, and legacy limitations provided by ASCII.More recently, the standard use of the typographic apostrophe is becoming more common on the Web due to the wide adoption of the Unicode text encoding standard, higher-resolution displays, and advanced anti-aliasing of text in modern operating systems. Because typewriter apostrophes are now often automatically converted to typographic apostrophes by word processing and desktop publishing software, the typographic apostrophe does often appear in documents produced by non-professionals, albeit sometimes incorrectly—see the section "Smart Quotes" below.
| Unicode | Macintosh | Windows-1252 Alt code | Linux/X | HTML entity | |
| U+2019 | 8217 | on number pad | or or | ’ |
XML defines an
' character entity reference for the ASCII typewriter apostrophe. ' is officially supported in HTML since HTML 5. It is not defined in HTML 4 despite all the other predefined character entities from XML being defined. If it cannot be entered literally in HTML, a numeric character reference could be used instead, such as ' or '.In the HTML entity
’ the rsquo is short for right single quotation mark.Smart quotes
To make typographic apostrophes easier to enter, word processing and publishing software often convert typewriter apostrophes to typographic apostrophes during text entry. 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 correct. Smart quotes features often incorrectly convert a leading apostrophe to an opening quotation mark. 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. Alternatively, typing Control-Z immediately after entering the apostrophe will convert it back to a typewriter apostrophe. In Microsoft Word for Windows, holding down the Control key while typing two apostrophes will produce a single typographic apostrophe.
Programming
Some programming languages, like Pascal, use the ASCII apostrophe to delimit string literals. In many languages, including JavaScript, ECMAScript, and Python, either the apostrophe or the double quote may be used, allowing string literals to contain the other character, e.g.foo = 'He said "Bar!"';. Strings delimited with apostrophes are often called single quoted. Some languages, such as Perl, PHP, and many shell languages, treat single quoted strings as "raw" strings, while double quoted strings have expressions replaced with their values when interpreted.The C programming language uses apostrophes to delimit a character literal. In these languages a character is a different object than a one-letter string.
In C++, since C++14, apostrophes are also used as digit separators in numeric literals.
In Visual Basic an apostrophe is used to denote the start of a comment.
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.