-2

I’ve always wondered what the correct apostrophe is when using contractions. Should I use She´s happy or She's happy?

  1. English´s a universal language.
  2. English's a universal language.

Why do a lot of people use ´ for this, as though it were café au lait? Am I missing something here?

Improve this question

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

"She's happy" uses unicode character U+0027, which is an apostrophe.

"She´s happy" uses unicode character U+00B4, which is an acute accent.

The first is correct, the second is wrong.

There are other alternatives to U+0027 as an apostrophe:-

There is unicode character, U+02BC [᾿], which is the modifier letter apostrophe and that could also be used appropriately.

It should be noted that the Unicode committee (controversially) recommend using character U+2019 [’] for an apostrophe (which is the right single quotation mark).

The reason that using the acute accent and right single quotation mark characters is a problem, is that machine parsing of the text (such as autoformatting) can misinterpret the intended character and produce erroneous output. (We see something similar here when people use the grave accent (U+0060 [`]) along with the acute accent as quotation marks and it renders the word between in code markup.)

Improve this answer
3
  • When handwriting or painting (e.g. a sign), you can make an apostrophe any shape you like; it doesn't have to be a dot with a tail. When I write with a pen, my apostrophes look like short acute accents.
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Dec 21, 2020 at 7:34
  • This isn't about the shape, on a computer that's determined by the choice of font, it's about the character that's being used. Using an acute accent when you should be using an apostrophe is just wrong.
    – KillingTime
    Commented Dec 21, 2020 at 7:44
  • @KillingTime You might also demonstrate ’ (U+2019, ASCII 146) which happens to be correctly formed in the font "Georgia" used here. And maybe even U+2032 (prime, ′) so that this might become a canonical answer.
    – Andrew Leach ♦
    Commented Dec 21, 2020 at 8:57

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .