Hot answers tagged apostrophe
47
Your example sentences confuse two different problems.
For nouns that are plural (such as "boys"), the possessive formed in writing by adding an apostrophe after the plural -s. This is pronounced the same as the plural and the singular possesive:
The boys' books [boys' sounds like boys]
For singular nouns that end in -s, the possessive is formed by ...
42
Since, 1810, forms like James’s (which I will call type A) have generally been more commonly used than forms like James’ (type B), according to my research using the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA).
I compared a number of names ending in -s looking for possessive forms with and without a final s. Here is a graph comparing incidences of type A ...
39
Short answer
Yes, this argument does have a basis in linguistic fact, which is why some people do it in the first place, but that doesn't mean it must be correct in Standard English (and it isn't).
Longer Answer
This argument does hold water in the linguistic sense. "My wife and I" is, in fact, a phrase — a syntactic constituent. The fact that this ...
26
It's not about a contraction "winning" over a possessive. "Its" is the possessive form of "it", like "his" is of "he", "hers" is of "she" or "their" is of "they". There is no missing apostrophe; the forms go back to a time when English was a highly inflected language. It predates modern, or even Middle, English.
The possessive formed by the apostrophe+s ...
26
I think the arguments on that site are pretty weak.
For one, the argument that "If you can't think of an example, there mustn't be one" is very poor. A lack of imagination does not constitute a robust argument.
In addition, the writer suggests replacing the pluralising 's' with a 'z', to get over the problem of singular and plural possessives. So, he's ...
22
Yes, it does happen to everyone, but the remorse belongs to each person individually. "Buyer's remorse" is the remorse experienced by a buyer. So the answer is (c).
Wikipedia agrees. Similarly the Corpus of Contemporary American English gives 36 examples of "buyer's remorse", but "buyer remorse" has just 1, and there are no results for either "buyers' ...
20
The apostrophe indicates possession.
Without an apostrophe you are indicating plurality.
Since the point you are trying to convey is that the assumption you made yesterday is no longer valid, the apostrophe is appropriate.
Yesterday's assumption is no longer valid.
It's kind of like saying "The assumption of yesterday".
18
The correct form of the idiom is:
first things first
Things is plural here. You could imagine having a put before the idiom:
put first things first
let's put first things first
you should put first things first
This clarifies the plurality of things. So, her thinking is actually fact!
17
I seem to remember the old askoxford.com site said either was acceptable: CDs and CD's.
But now the replacement Oxford Dictionaries Online firmly suggests to avoid the apostrophe except in a few special cases:
Apostrophes and plural forms
The general rule is that you should not use an apostrophe to form the plurals
of nouns, abbreviations, or ...
17
Because the dozen isn't the collective property of all bakers, but of a generic baker. It's the same reason it's a carpenter's square, a driver's license, or a greengrocer's apostrophe.
You see both farmer's market and farmers' market because there are several farmers selling at a farmers' market, so you can also think of it as a market that collectively ...
16
In The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, the late Burchfield offered a guide to the use of possessive s and of with inanimate nouns. It is the most comprehensive and well founded stylistic advice I could find on the subject. He had worked on the Oxford English Dictionary and knew a lot about language and style. A summary:
By default, inanimate nouns should ...
15
The regular way to pluralize any noun is by adding just an s; the apostrophe should only be added to plural s if the word would otherwise become unreadable or exceedingly ambiguous. A good example would be s's (the plural of the letter s: ss would look like an acronym).
The word URLs would seem to be quite clear: *URL's is probably a simple error made by ...
13
The possessive 's comes from the masculine genitive case ending on -es in Old English. This means that you could say "of [the] man" by simply sticking -es after "man". The genitive case was often used to indicate the possessor of something. In German, the genitive case is still used, and it ends on -(e)s for masculine and neuter singular words: the man = der ...
13
If your intention is to address each member of the audience directly, I suggest you prefix the phrase with an appropriate article, as in:
A Beginner's Guide to Shoe Hurling
or
The Beginner's Guide to Shoe Hurling
The use of the apostrophe before s seems more apt in this context.
Although:
Beginners' Guide to Shoe Hurling
is also ...
13
As the doctor also has an appointment with you, doctor's appointment is unequivocally correct in its own right. It is also by far the most common as a set phrase:
Any other plural usage would be entirely subjective, but I don't feel doctors appointment would be appropriate under any circumstance.
13
No. It is not (necessarily) a typo. The following examples are all perfectly acceptable uses (at least grammatically) of the possesive form of women.
Women's rights
Women's work
Women's intuition
Women's gossip
I am unable to answer your question about whether or not Firefox is sexist.
12
I always use "master's degree". Read the following article for more details:
Masters Degree or Master’s Degree? by Maeve Maddox
To answer this question, I’ve consulted the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, and some university dissertation guidelines.
Speaking generically, you would write master’s degree:
Jack has finally earned his master’s
...
11
From this Wikipedia page:
It is generally acceptable to use apostrophes to show plurals of single
lower-case letters, such as be sure to
dot your i's and cross your t's. Some
style guides would prefer to use a
change of font: dot your is and cross
your ts. Upper case
letters need no apostrophe (I got
three As in my exams) except when
...
11
Apostrophes can be used to show omission of letters.
It can also be used to form plurals of lowercase letters.
Consider if, after abbreviating "Athletic(s)" to "A", you wanted to refer to the team in a sentence: The As won the game. One could easily misread the team name as the word "as", though that makes the sentence ungrammatical. The apostrophe clears ...
10
The second and third phrases are correct:
The house's windows
The windows of the house
There is no requirement in the English language that possessors be people, and it's extremely common for inanimate objects to be used with the possessive 's. There is very little difference between the version that uses 's and the version that uses of.
Related: Is ...
10
according to Etymonline.com, "oft" is the original form of "often"; it was lengthened around 1300, presumably as a parallel to "selden" (which later mutated spelling slightly to "seldom").
So no, "oft" is not a contraction, and therefore has no need of an apostrophe; but it does mean exactly the same thing as "often", it's simply the archaic form of the ...
10
An easy way to differentiate:
An apostrophe is only used within or at the very end of a word - it is part of the word.
In English, it serves three purposes:
The marking of the omission of one or more letters (as in the contraction of do not to don't).
The marking of possessive case (as in the cat's whiskers).
The marking as plural of written ...
10
The difference is in the number of users.
User's guide: A guide belonging to one user.
Users' guide: A guide belonging to all the users.
I'd be inclined to use the first sense rather than the second sense, since the "one" user is really an abstract representation of all the users anyway.
10
The difference is this: s' is used for plural possessive; 's is used for singular possessive; s' can also be used at the end of proper names that end in s to indicate the possessive without adding the extra s.
Since only one user is likely to be reading a "User's Guide" at a time, it would make sense to use the 's in that title. That may be why your ...
10
As the chart of English contractions on Wikipedia points out, 's can be used in place of does (as well as is, has, was and as).
It can also be used to represent the entirely unrelated us, as in let's.
10
According to an earlier answer to another question, David Crystal's book The Fight for English: How language pundits ate, shot, and left says that lack of apostrophes in possessive pronouns was due to forgetfulness on the part of 19th century printers and grammarians:
Its is just as possessive as cat’s, but it doesn’t have an apostrophe. Why not? ...
9
The latter is generally considered correct. From the OED:
First things first: (to give) first place to the most important things.
[under first, adj., 4a, Foremost, preceding all others, in dignity, rank, importance, or excellence.]
Comparing google hits as a very rough measure of usage gives
"first things first": 1,660,000
"first thing's first": ...
9
First of all, see my answer here regarding the correct way to make a possessive of a name ending in S. (Short version, both James’ and James’s can be considered correct).
For possessive plurals of names ending in S, you first have to form the plural. Like any noun ending in S, the plural adds -ES, so one James, two Jameses. For possessive, just add an ...
9
You can argue cogently for either position:
Beginner's Guide - this is a guide for one beginner at a time (and is probably the best choice)
Beginners' Guide - this is a guide for all beginners at the same time.
However, normally one person is reading (one copy of) a text at a time, and therefore "Beginner's" is the more normal. It is more likely that ...
Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible
