Apostrophe
Punctuation or diacritical mark (') / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The mark ' redirects here. For other uses, see ' (disambiguation)
This article is about the punctuation mark. For other uses, see Apostrophe (disambiguation).
Not to be confused with ʻOkina.
The apostrophe (' or ’) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for three basic purposes:
- The marking of the omission of one or more letters, e.g. the contraction of "do not" to "don't"
- The marking of possessive case of nouns (as in "the eagle's feathers", "in one month's time", "the twins' coats")
- Use as a single quotation mark
Quick Facts ' ’, ' ’ Typewriter apostrophe or neutral single quote Punctuation apostrophe or typographic right single quote ...
' ’ | |||||
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Apostrophe | |||||
U+0027 ' APOSTROPHE U+2019 ’ RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK | |||||
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It is also used in a few distinctive cases for the marking of plurals, e.g. "p's and q's" or Oakland A's.
It is also used informally to indicate the units of foot, minutes of time, and minutes of arc, although in these uses, the prime symbol is generally preferred.
The word apostrophe comes ultimately from the Greek ἡ ἀπόστροφος [προσῳδία], through Latin and French.[1][2]