You need to type out the whole sentence so be very careful with your punctuation and spelling. This time you need to type out the words that make the contraction. You need to type chicken road game in the correct answer. Focus on the words that are highlighted in green.
Putting the apostrophe at the end means that we know there are multiple students or many dancers being referred to. It’s a handy tool because instead of saying the bedroom of Luca, the apostrophe and the s make it Luca’s bedroom. Apostrophes may be small but they play a vital role in clarifying information within a sentence. Comes in plurals which don’t (do not) need it. The most common grammatical mistake in written English is to put it’s where its is correct. Even when apostrophe errors do not cause confusion, their presence demonstrates a lack of attention to proofreading, which detracts from the professionalism of your writing.
- In C++, since C++14, apostrophes can be included as optional digit separators in numeric literals.
- For other languages and symbol sets (especially in mathematics and science), see below.
- First, remind yourself how apostrophes are used for contraction by watching this video.
- Place names in the United States do not use the possessive apostrophe on federal maps and signs.
University of Waterloo Writing and Communication Centre
The practice, once common and acceptable (see Historical development), comes from the identical sound of the plural and possessive forms of most English nouns. Apostrophes used in a non-standard manner to form noun plurals are known as greengrocers’ apostrophes or grocers’ apostrophes or grocer’s apostrophes. The English possessive of French nouns ending in a silent ⟨s⟩, ⟨x⟩, or ⟨z⟩ is addressed by various style guides. When the noun is a normal plural, with an added ⟨s⟩, no extra ⟨s⟩ is added in the possessive, and it is pronounced accordingly; so “the neighbours’ garden” (there is more than one neighbour owning the garden) is standard rather than “the neighbours’s garden”.
Certainly a sibilant is pronounced in examples like Descartes’s and Dumas’s; the question addressed here is whether ⟨s⟩ needs to be added. 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). 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”). The plural form of “glass” is “glasses” and the plural possessive form is, therefore, “glasses'”. That dictionary also cites a study that found that only 40% of the possessive forms were used to indicate actual possession.
French practice
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.
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.
Apostrophes and Singular Nouns
Furthermore, the limited character set provided by computer keyboards has also required practical and pragmatic adjustments. Similarly in mathematics, the prime is generally used to generate more variable names for similar things without resorting to subscripts, with x′ generally meaning something related to (or derived from) x. Similarly, the prime symbol is the formal representation of a minute of arc (1/60 of a degree in geometry and geomatics), and double prime represents a second of arc (for example, 17°54′32″ represents 17 degrees 54 minutes and 32 seconds). Both simplifications carried over to computer keyboards and the ASCII character set.
Early English practice
Watch this video to revise apostrophes for contraction. You can just add an apostrophe to show the feet belong to the brothers. This is called a possessive apostrophe.
The solution was to use an apostrophe after the plural ⟨s⟩ (as in “girls’ dresses”). This was regarded as representing not the elision of the ⟨e⟩ in the “-e” or “-es” ending of the word being pluralized, but the elision of the ⟨e⟩ from the Old English genitive singular inflection “-es”. Similarly, apostrophes are not needed in abbreviations like DVDs or HGVs.
Forming possessives of nouns
Truss says this usage is no longer considered proper in formal writing. A 2004 report by British examination board OCR stated that “the inaccurate use of the apostrophe is so widespread as to be almost universal”. Finally, in “scientific” transliteration of Cyrillic script, the apostrophe usually represents the soft sign ь, though in “ordinary” transliteration it is usually omitted. Furthermore, an apostrophe may be used to indicate a glottal stop in transliterations. For many numbers and symbols, a useful alternative is to write out the numbers as words (e.g. thousands instead of 1000s or 1000’s, and ampersands instead of &s or &’s). While many guides discourage using an apostrophe in all numbers/dates, many other guides encourage using an apostrophe for numbers or are divided on the issue; for example, the Australian Government Style Manual recommends “Binary code uses 0’s and 1’s” but recommends “the 2020s”.
For more details on practice with geographic names, see the relevant section below. However, debate has been going on regarding the punctuation of St James’ Park (Newcastle) for some time, unlike St James’s Park (London) which is the less contentious version. The possessive of it was originally it’s, in contrast to the modern its.
Video about how to check your apostrophes
An apostrophe can be used to show that one thing belongs to (or is connected to) something. The apostrophe can be used to show who things belong to. Using contractions like these makes your writing easier to read and more informal. Some words don’t join together so easily. This is how it contracts the two words together. Apostrophes are strange little creatures that can cause two words to merge.
- Brothers is a plural noun that ends in an ‘s’, so you don’t add another ‘s’ after your apostrophe.
- Maintained by the Department of Informatics, University of Sussex
- Guides typically seek a principle that will yield uniformity, even for foreign words that fit awkwardly with standard English punctuation.
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”. If you have a name that ends in “s,” or if you will observe home-made signs selling tomatoes or chili-and-beans, you will quickly note what can be done with a possessive apostrophe in reckless hands. Rather than ʿ (modifier letter left half ring), the apostrophe is sometimes used to indicate a voiced pharyngeal fricative as it sounds and looks like the glottal stop to most English speakers. The addition of an s without an apostrophe may make the text difficult to read. Some style guides state that the apostrophe is unnecessary since there is no ambiguity but that some editors and teachers prefer this usage. The apostrophe is very often used in plurals of symbols, for example “that page has too many &’s and #’s on it”.
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.
Watch: Apostrophes for possession
In Visual Basic (and earlier Microsoft BASIC dialects such as QuickBASIC) an apostrophe is used to denote the start of a comment.note 12 Alternatively, typing Control-Z (for Undo) immediately after entering the apostrophe will convert it back to a typewriter apostrophe. A similar facility may be offered on web servers after submitting text in a form field, e.g. on weblogs or free encyclopedias. Outside the world of professional typesetting and graphic design, most people use the typewriter apostrophe (‘). In Unicode (which practically all vendors have adopted), this apostrophe is encoded as U+2019 ’ RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK. 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.
They are sometimes humorously called greengrocers apostrophe’s, rogue apostrophes, or idiot’s apostrophes (a literal translation of the German word Deppenapostroph, which criticises the misapplication of apostrophes in Denglisch). Failure to observe standard use of the apostrophe is widespread and frequently criticised as incorrect, often generating heated debate. 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).
List of typographical symbols and punctuation marks
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.