Apostrophe

Mine's a what?

© Lee J Haywood

The Apostrophe is a diacritic mark in punctuation.

It is used in 2 different ways in English:

1. to show possessive nouns
2. to show omitted letters

Possession

Generally we add an apostrophe s to the end of a noun to make it possessive:

If there is a plural noun which ends in an -s, then we add the apostrophe after it but without the -s. In this case there are many girls who each have bikes:

Compare these:

If there is a proper noun ending in -es then we use an apostrophe without the -s:

For more on this, see Possessive Apostrophes.

In cases where several nouns are together, we have a choice. If the nouns form a single unit we use an apostrophe on the last noun only; if the nouns are to be treated as individual then we have an apostrophe for each one.

Here the wedding belongs to both the nouns:

But in this case, we are talking about two different sets of parents:

Note that the apostrophe is not used with certain possessive words which on the surface might require one:

However, we do use an apostrophe when we use one.

Omission

We use an apostrophe to show where letters have been removed from words:

Greengrocers' Apostrophes

It is not uncommon for native speakers to make mistakes with apostrophes, often using them to denote plurals or omitting them entirely. These are known as Greengrocers' Apostrophes (or ironically as Greengrocers Apostrophe's)

See Also

Forum Posting on use of an apostrophe with Mother's Day.