Apostrophe

Historical development

The apostrophe was first used by Pietro Bembo in his edition of De Aetna (1496).^[4] It was introduced into English in the 16th century in imitation of French practice.^[5]

Possessive apostrophe

The apostrophe is used in English to indicate what is, for historical reasons, misleadingly called the possessive case in the English language. This case was called the genitive until the 18th century and (like the genitive case in other languages) does not always involve possession. For example, in the phrase "little Roger's headmaster", little Roger does not own the headmaster; in the phrase "tomorrow's weather", tomorrow does not/will not own the weather.

In the words of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage:^[8]

The argument is a case of fooling oneself with one's own terminology. After the 18th-century grammarians began to refer to the genitive case as the possessive case, grammarians and other commentators got it into their heads that the only use of the case was to show possession.... Simply changing the name of the genitive does not change or eliminate any of its multiple functions.

This dictionary also cites a study^[9] which found that only 40% of the possessive forms were used to indicate actual possession.^[10]

The modern spelling convention distinguishes possessive singular forms (Bernadette's, flower's, glass's, one's) from simple plural forms (Bernadettes, flowers, glasses, ones), and both of those from possessive plural forms (Bernadettes', flowers', glasses', ones').

For singulars, the modern possessive or genitive inflection is a survival from certain genitive inflections in Old English, and the apostrophe originally marked the loss of the old e (for example, lambes became lamb's). Until the 18th century, the apostrophe was extensively used to indicate (subjective, "normal") plural, and its use for indicating plural "possessive" use was not standard before the middle of the 19th century.

Possessives in business names

Sign to Green Craigs housing development

See also: S-form

Where a business name is based on a family name it should in theory take an apostrophe, but many leave it out (contrast Sainsbury's with Harrods). In recent times there has been an increasing tendency to drop the apostrophe. Names based on a first name are more likely to take an apostrophe, but this is not always the case. Some business names may inadvertently spell a different name if the name with an s at the end is also a name, such as Parson. A small activist group called the Apostrophe Protection Society^[52] has campaigned for large retailers such as Harrods, Currys, and Selfridges to reinstate their missing punctuation. A spokesperson for Barclays PLC stated, "It has just disappeared over the years. Barclays is no longer associated with the family name."^[53] Further confusion can be caused by businesses whose names look as if they should be pronounced differently without an apostrophe, such as Paulos Circus, and other companies that leave the apostrophe out of their logos but include it in written text, such as Cadwalader's.

Apostrophe showing omission

An apostrophe is commonly used to indicate omitted characters, normally letters:

• It is used in contractions, such as can't from cannot, it's from it is or it has, and I'll from I will or I shall.^[54]
• It is used in abbreviations, as gov't for government. It may indicate omitted numbers where the spoken form is also capable of omissions, as '70s for 1970s representing seventies for nineteen-seventies. In modern usage, apostrophes are generally omitted when letters are removed from the start of a word, particularly for a compound word. For example, it is not common to write 'bus (for omnibus), 'phone (telephone), 'net (Internet). However, if the shortening is unusual, dialectal or archaic, the apostrophe may still be used to mark it (e.g., 'bout for about, 'less for unless, 'twas for it was). Sometimes a misunderstanding of the original form of a word results in a non-standard contraction. A common example: 'til for until, though till is in fact the original form, and until is derived from it.
  • The spelling fo'c's'le, contracted from the nautical term forecastle, is unusual for having three apostrophes. The spelling bo's'n's (from boatswain's), as in Bo's'n's Mate, also has three apostrophes, two showing omission and one possession. Fo'c's'le may also take a possessive s – as in the fo'c's'le's timbers – giving four apostrophes in one word.^[55] A word which formerly contained two apostrophes is sha'n't for shall not, examples of which may be found in the older works of P G Wodehouse and "Frank Richards" (Charles Hamilton), but this has been superseded by shan't.
• It is sometimes used when the normal form of an inflection seems awkward or unnatural; for example, KO'd rather than KOed (where KO is used as a verb meaning "to knock out"); "a spare pince-nez'd man" (cited in OED, entry for "pince-nez"; pince-nezed is also in citations).
• An apostrophe's function as possessive or contractive can depend on the grammatical context:
  • We rehearsed for Friday's opening night. (We rehearsed for the opening night on Friday.)
  • We rehearsed because Friday's opening night. (We rehearsed because Friday is opening night. "Friday's" here is a contraction of "Friday is.")
• Eye dialects use apostrophes in creating the effect of a non-standard pronunciation.
• Apostrophes to omit letters in place names are common on British road signs when space does not allow for the full name (e.g. Wolverhampton abbreviated as "W'hampton" and Kidderminster as "K'minster", as shown on this sign).

Use in forming some plurals

The apostrophe can be used in plural abbreviations
as in the team logo of the Oakland A's.

The apostrophe may be used for clarity with the plurals of single letters as in

"minding your p's and q's"

"A's and S's"^[56]

Use of the apostrophe may be recommended only for lowercase letters.^[57]

An apostrophe is used by some writers to form a plural for abbreviations, initials including acronyms, and symbols, especially where adding just s rather than 's may leave meaning ambiguous or presentation inelegant. Some specific cases:

• For groups of years, most style guides prefer 1960s to 1960's^[58] and 90s or '90s to 90's or '90's.^[59][60]
• The apostrophe is sometimes used in forming the plural of numbers, for example 1000's of years, though discouraged by several guides.^[60][61] An alternative is to write out the numbers as words.^[62]
• The apostrophe is often used in plurals of symbols, for example "that page has too many &'s and #'s on it". Some style guides state that the apostrophe is unnecessary since there is no ambiguity but that some editors and teachers prefer this usage.^[58] The addition of an 's' without an apostrophe may make the text difficult to read.^[62]

For abbreviations, acronyms, etc., use of 's' without an apostrophe is now more common than its use with an apostrophe, but for single lowercase letters, pluralization with -'s is usual.^[63][64][65]

Use in non-English names

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).

• Anglicised versions of Irish surnames often contain an apostrophe after an O, for example O'Doole.
• Some Scottish and Irish surnames use an apostrophe after an M, for example M'Gregor. The apostrophe here may be seen as marking a contraction where the prefix Mc or Mac would normally appear. However, it may also arise from confusion of ‘ (turned comma or "6-quote"), which was used as a substitute for superscript c when printing with hand-set metal type. Compare: M'Lean, M^cLean, M‘Lean.^[66]

Use in transliteration

In transliterated foreign words, an apostrophe may be used to separate letters or syllables that otherwise would likely be interpreted incorrectly. For example:

• in the Arabic word mus'haf, a transliteration of مصحف‬, the syllables are as in mus·haf, not mu·shaf
• in the Japanese name Shin'ichi, the apostrophe shows that the pronunciation is shi·n·i·chi (hiragana しんいち), where the letters n (ん) and i (い) are separate morae, rather than shi·ni·chi (しにち).
• in the Chinese Pinyin romanization, the apostrophe (') (隔音符號, géyīn fúhào, 'syllable-dividing mark') is used before a syllable starting with a vowel (a, o, or e) in a multiple-syllable word when the syllable does not start the word (which is most commonly realized as [ɰ]), unless the syllable immediately follows a hyphen or other dash.^[67] This is done to remove ambiguity that could arise, as in Xi'an, which consists of the two syllables xi ("西") an ("安"), compared to such words as xian ("先"). (This ambiguity does not occur when tone marks are used: The two tone marks in Xīān unambiguously show that the word consists of two syllables. However, even with tone marks, the city is usually spelled with an apostrophe as Xī'ān.)

Furthermore, an apostrophe may be used to indicate a glottal stop in transliterations. For example:

• in the Arabic word Qur'an, a common transliteration of (part of) القرآن‬ al-qur'ān, the apostrophe corresponds to the diacritic Maddah over the 'alif, one of the letters in the Arabic alphabet

Rather than ʿ the apostrophe is sometimes used to indicate a voiced pharyngeal fricative as it sounds and looks like the glottal stop to most English speakers. For example:

• in the Arabic word Ka'aba for الكعبة‬ al-kaʿbah, the apostrophe corresponds to the Arabic letter ʿayn.

Non-standard English use

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.

— Algis Budrys, 1965^[68]

Failure to observe standard use of the apostrophe is widespread and frequently criticised as incorrect,^[69][70] often generating heated debate. 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".^[71] A 2004 report by British examination board OCR stated that "the inaccurate use of the apostrophe is so widespread as to be almost universal".^[72] A 2008 survey found that nearly half of the UK adults polled were unable to use the apostrophe correctly.^[70]

Superfluous apostrophes ("greengrocers' apostrophes")

A sign pointing to taxis at Leeds railway station, England, with the extraneous apostrophe crossed out by an unknown copy editor

Apostrophes used in a non-standard manner to form noun plurals are known as greengrocers' apostrophes or grocers' apostrophes, often called (spelled) greengrocer's apostrophes^[73] and grocer's apostrophes.^[74] 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). The practice, once common and acceptable (see Historical development), comes from the identical sound of the plural and possessive forms of most English nouns. It is often criticised as a form of hypercorrection coming from a widespread ignorance of the proper use of the apostrophe or of punctuation in general. Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, points out that before the 19th century, it was standard orthography to use the apostrophe to form a plural of a foreign-sounding word that ended in a vowel (e. g., banana's, folio's, logo's, quarto's, pasta's, ouzo's) to clarify pronunciation. Truss says this usage is no longer considered proper in formal writing.^[75]

The term is believed to have been coined in the middle of the 20th century by a teacher of languages working in Liverpool, at a time when such mistakes were common in the handwritten signs and advertisements of greengrocers (e. g., Apple's 1/- a pound, Orange's 1/6d a pound). Some have argued that its use in mass communication by employees of well-known companies has led to the less literate assuming it to be standard and adopting the habit themselves.^[76]

The same use of apostrophe before noun plural -s forms is sometimes made by non-native speakers of English. For example, in Dutch, the apostrophe is inserted before the s when pluralising most words ending in a vowel or y for example, baby's (English babies) and radio's (English radios). This often produces so-called "Dunglish" errors when carried over into English.^[77] Hyperforeignism has been formalised in some pseudo-anglicisms. For example, the French word pin's (from English pin) is used (with the apostrophe in both singular and plural) for collectible lapel pins. Similarly, there is an Andorran football club called FC Rànger's (after such British clubs as Rangers F.C.) and a Japanese dance group called Super Monkey's.

Criticism

Over the years, the use of apostrophes has been criticised. George Bernard Shaw called them "uncouth bacilli", referring to the apostrophe-like shape of many bacteria. In his book American Speech, linguist Steven Byington stated of the apostrophe that "the language would be none the worse for its abolition". Adrian Room, in his English Journal article "Axing the Apostrophe", argued that apostrophes are unnecessary, and context will resolve any ambiguity.^[85] In a letter to the English Journal, Peter Brodie stated that apostrophes are "largely decorative ... [and] rarely clarify meaning".^[86] John C. Wells, emeritus professor of phonetics at University College London, says the apostrophe is "a waste of time".^[85]

As a mark of elision

In many languages, especially European languages, the apostrophe is used to indicate the elision of one or more sounds, as in English.

• In Albanian the apostrophe is used to show that a vowel has been omitted from words, especially in different forms of verbs and in some forms of personal pronoun. For example, t'i them (from të + i them), m'i mori (from më + i mori). It is used too in some of the forms of possessive pronouns, for example: s'ëmës (from së ëmës).
• In Afrikaans the apostrophe is used to show that letters have been omitted from words. The most common use is in the indefinite article 'n, which is a contraction of een meaning 'one' (the number). As the initial e is omitted and cannot be capitalised, if a sentence begins with 'n the second word in the sentence is capitalised. For example: 'n Boom is groen, 'A tree is green'. In addition, the apostrophe is used for plurals and diminutives where the root ends with long vowels, e.g. foto's, taxi's, Lulu's, Lulu'tjie, etc.^[87]
• In Danish, apostrophes are sometimes seen on commercial materials. One might commonly see Ta' mig med ('Take me with [you]') next to a stand with advertisement leaflets; that would be written Tag mig med in standard orthography. As in German, the apostrophe must not be used to indicate the possessive, except when there is already an s, x or z present in the base form, as in Esajas' bog ('the Book of Esajas').
• In Dutch, the apostrophe is used to indicate omitted characters. For example, the indefinite article een can be shortened to 'n, and the definite article het shortened to 't. When this happens in the first word of a sentence, the second word of the sentence is capitalised. In general, this way of using the apostrophe is considered non-standard, except in 's morgens, 's middags, 's avonds, 's nachts (for des morgens, des middags, des avonds, des nachts, 'at morning, at afternoon, at evening, at night'). In addition, the apostrophe is used for plurals where the singulars end with long vowels, e.g. foto's, taxi's; and for the genitive of proper names ending with these vowels, e.g. Anna's, Otto's. These are in fact elided vowels; use of the apostrophe prevents spellings like fotoos and Annaas. However, most diminutives do not use an apostrophe where the plural forms would; producing spellings such as fotootje and taxietje.
• In Esperanto, the Fundamento limits the elision mark to the definite article l' (from la) and singular nominative nouns (kor' from koro, 'heart'). This is mostly confined to poetry and songs. Idiomatic phrases such as dank' al (from (kun) danko al, 'thanks to') and del' (from de la, 'of the') are nonetheless frequent. In-word elision is usually marked with a hyphen, as in D-ro (from doktoro, 'Dr'). Some early guides used and advocated the use of apostrophes between word parts, to aid recognition of such compound words as gitar'ist'o, 'guitarist'.
• In Catalan, French, Italian, Ligurian, and Occitan word sequences such as (coup) d'état, (maître) d'hôtel (often shortened to maître d', when used in English), L'Aquila and L'Hospitalet de Llobregat the final vowel in the first word (de 'of', la 'the', etc.) is elided because the word that follows it starts with a vowel or a mute h. Similarly, French has qu'il instead of que il ('that he'), c'est instead of ce est ('it is or it's'), and so on. Catalan, French, Italian, and Occitan surnames sometimes contain apostrophes of elision, e.g. d'Alembert, D'Angelo.
• French feminine singular possessive adjectives do not undergo elision, but change to the masculine form instead: ma preceding église becomes mon église ('my church').^{[lower-alpha 6]}
• Quebec's Bill 101, which dictates the use of French in the province, prohibits the use of apostrophes in proper names in which it would not be used in proper French (thus the international donut chain Tim Hortons, originally spelled with the possessive apostrophe as Tim Horton's, was required to drop the apostrophe in Quebec to comply with Bill 101).^[88]
• Galician language standard admits the use of apostrophe (apóstrofo) for contractions that normally don't use (e.g.: de + a= da) it but when the second element is a proper noun, mostly a title: o heroe d'A Odisea (the heroe of the Odyssey). They are also used to reproduce oral ellisions and, as stated below, to join (or split) commercial names of popular public establishments, namely bars and in masculine (O'Pote, The pot), maybe pretending to remind anglicised versions of Irish surnames.
• In Ganda, when a word ending with a vowel is followed by a word beginning with a vowel, the final vowel of the first word is elided and the initial vowel of the second word lengthened in compensation. When the first word is a monosyllable, this elision is represented in the orthography with an apostrophe: in taata w'abaana 'the father of the children', wa ('of') becomes w'; in y'ani? ('who is it?'), ye ('who') becomes y'. But the final vowel of a polysyllable is always written, even if it is elided in speech: omusajja oyo ('this man'), not *omusajj'oyo, because omusajja ('man') is a polysyllable.

• In modern printings of Ancient Greek, apostrophes are also used to mark elision. Some Ancient Greek words that end in short vowels elide when the next word starts with a vowel. For example, many Ancient Greek authors would write δἄλλος (d'állos) for δὲ ἄλλος (dè állos) and ἆροὐ (âr' ou) for ἆρα οὐ (âra ou). Such modern usage should be carefully distinguished from polytonic Greek's native rough and smooth breathing marks, which usually appear as a form of rounded apostrophe.
• In Hebrew, the geresh (׳), often typed as an apostrophe, is used to denote initialisms. A double geresh (״), known by the dual form gershayim, is used to denote acronyms; it is inserted before (i.e., to the right of) the last letter of the acronym. Examples: פרופ׳ (abbreviation for פרופסור, 'professor', 'professor'); נ״ב (nun-bet, 'P.S.'). The geresh is also used to indicate the elision of a sound; however, this use is much less frequent, and confined to the purpose of imitating a natural, informal utterance, for example: אנ׳לא‎ (anlo – short for אני לא‎, ani lo, 'I am/do not').
• In Irish, the past tense of verbs beginning with a vowel, or with fh followed by a vowel, begins with d' (elision of do), for example do oscail becomes d'oscail ('opened') and do fhill becomes d'fhill ('returned'). The copula is is often elided to 's, and do ('to'), mo ('my') etc. are elided before f and vowels.
• In Italian it is used for elision with pronouns, as in l'ha instead of la ha, articles, as in l'opera instead of la opera, and for truncation, as in po' instead of poco.
• In modern Norwegian, the apostrophe marks that a word has been contracted, such as ha'kke from har ikke ('have/has not'). Unlike English and French, such elisions are not accepted as part of standard orthography but are used to create a more "oral style" in writing. The apostrophe is also used to mark the genitive for words that end in an -s sound: words ending in -s, -x, and -z, some speakers also including words ending in the sound Norwegian pronunciation: [ʃ]. As Norwegian doesn't form the plural with -s, there is no need to distinguish between an -s forming the possessive and the -s forming the plural. Therefore, we have mann ('man') and manns ('man's'), without apostrophe, but los ('naval pilot') and los' ('naval pilot's'). Indicating the possessive for the two former American presidents named George Bush, whose names end in Norwegian pronunciation: [ʃ], could be written as both Bushs (simply adding an -s to the name) and Bush' (adding an apostrophe to the end of the name).
• In Portuguese the apostrophe is also used in a few combinations, such as caixa-d'água ('water tower'), galinha-d'angola ('guineafowl'), pau-d'alho (a plant species, Gallesia integrifolia), etc. Portuguese has many contractions between prepositions and articles or pronouns (like na for em + a), but these are written without an apostrophe.
• Modern Spanish no longer uses the apostrophe to indicate elision in standard writing, although it can sometimes be found in older poetry for that purpose.^{[lower-alpha 7]} Instead Spanish writes out the spoken elision in full (de enero, mi hijo) except for the contraction del for de + el, which uses no apostrophe. Spanish also switches to a form that is identical to the masculine article (but is actually a variant of the feminine article) immediately before a feminine noun beginning with a stressed a instead of writing (or saying) an elision: un águila blanca, el águila blanca, and el agua pura but una/la blanca águila and la pura agua. This reflects the origin of the Spanish definite articles from the Latin demonstratives ille/illa/illum.
• In Swedish, the apostrophe marks an elision, such as på sta'n, short for på staden ('in the city'), to make the text more similar to the spoken language. This is relaxed style, fairly rarely used, and would not be used by traditional newspapers in political articles, but could be used in entertainment related articles and similar. The formal way to denote elision in Swedish is by using colon, e.g. S:t Erik for Sankt Erik which is rarely spelled out in full. The apostrophe must not be used to indicate the possessive except – although not mandatory – when there is already an s, x or z present in the base form, as in Lukas' bok.
• In German an apostrophe is used almost exclusively to indicate omitted letters. It must not be used for plurals or most of the possessive forms. (The only exceptions are the possessive cases of names ending in an "s"-sound as in Max' Vater, or "to prevent ambiguities" in all other possessive cases of names, as in Andrea's Blumenladen. The latter use is discouraged, while being formally correct.) Although possessive usage (beyond the exceptions) is widespread, it is often deemed incorrect. The German equivalent of "greengrocers' apostrophes" would be the derogatory Deppenapostroph ('idiot's apostrophe'; see the article Apostrophitis in German Wikipedia).
• Welsh uses the apostrophe to mark elision of the definite article yr ('the') following a vowel (a, e, i, o, u, y, or, in Welsh, w), as in i'r tŷ, 'to the house'. It is also used with the particle yn, such as with mae hi'n, 'she is'.

As a glottal stop

Several languages and transliteration systems use the apostrophe or some similar mark to indicate a glottal stop, sometimes considering it a letter of the alphabet:

• In several Finno-Ugric languages, such as Estonian and Finnish; for example in the Finnish word raa'an, being the genitive or accusative of raaka ('raw').
• In Guarani, it is called puso /puˈso/, and used in the words ñe'ẽ (language, to speak), ka'a (grass), a'ỹ (sterile).
• In Hawaiian, the ʻokina ⟨ʻ⟩, an inverted apostrophe, is often rendered as ⟨'⟩. It is considered a letter of the alphabet.
• Mayan.
• In the Tongan language, the apostrophe is called a fakauʻa and is the last letter of the alphabet. It represents the glottal stop. Like the ʻokina, it is inverted.
• Various other Austronesian languages, such as Samoan, Tahitian, and Chamorro.
• Tetum, one of the official languages of East Timor.
• The Brazilian native Tupi language.
• Mossi (Mooré), a language of Burkina Faso.
• In Võro, the apostrophe is used in parallel with the letter q as symbol of plural.
• Several fictional languages such as Klingon, D'ni, Mando'a or Na'vi.^[89]

The apostrophe represents sounds resembling the glottal stop in the Turkic languages and in some romanizations of Semitic languages, including Arabic. In typography, this function may be performed by the closing single quotation mark. In that case, the Arabic letter 'ayn (ع) is correspondingly transliterated with the opening single quotation mark.

As a mark of palatalization or non-palatalization

Some languages and transliteration systems use the apostrophe to mark the presence, or the lack of, palatalization:

• In Belarusian and Ukrainian, the apostrophe is used between a consonant and a following "soft" (iotified) vowel (Be.: е, ё, ю, я; Uk.: є, ї, ю, я) to indicate that no palatalization of the preceding consonant takes place, and the vowel is pronounced in the same way as at the beginning of the word. It therefore marks a morpheme boundary before /j/, and in Ukrainian, is also occasionally as a "quasi-letter". It appears frequently in Ukrainian, as, for instance, in the words: <п'ять> [p"jat'] 'five', <від'їзд> [vid'jizd] 'departure', <об'єднаний> [ob'jednanyj] 'united', <з'ясувати> [z'jasuvaty] 'to clear up, explain', <п'єса> [p'jesa] play (drama), etc.^[90][91]
• In Russian and some derived alphabets, the same function has been served by the hard sign (ъ, formerly called yer). But the apostrophe saw some use as a substitute after 1918, when Soviet authorities enforced an orthographic reform by confiscating movable type bearing the hard sign from stubborn printing houses in Petrograd.^[92]
• In some Latin transliterations of certain Cyrillic alphabets (for Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian), the apostrophe is used to replace the soft sign (ь, indicating palatalization of the preceding consonant), e.g., Русь is transliterated Rus' according to the BGN/PCGN system. (The prime symbol is also used for the same purpose.) Some of these transliteration schemes use a double apostrophe ( ˮ ) to represent the apostrophe in Ukrainian and Belarusian text, e.g. Ukrainian слов'янське ('Slavic') is transliterated as slov"yans'ke.
• Some Karelian orthographies use an apostrophe to indicate palatalization, e.g. n'evvuo ('to give advice'), d'uuri ('just (like)'), el'vüttiä ('to revive').

To separate morphemes

Some languages use the apostrophe to separate the root of a word and its affixes, especially if the root is foreign and unassimilated. (For another kind of morphemic separation see pinyin, below.)

• In Danish an apostrophe is sometimes used to join the enclitic definite article to words of foreign origin, or to other words that would otherwise look awkward. For example, one would write IP'en to mean "the IP address". There is some variation in what is considered "awkward enough" to warrant an apostrophe; for instance, long-established words such as firma ('company') or niveau ('level') might be written firma'et and niveau'et, but will generally be seen without an apostrophe. Due to Danish influence, this usage of the apostrophe can also be seen in Norwegian, but is non-standard – a hyphen should be used instead: e.g. CD-en (the CD).
• In Estonian, apostrophes can be used in the declension of some foreign names to separate the stem from any declension endings; e.g., Monet' (genitive case) or Monet'sse (illative case) of Monet (name of the famous painter).
• In Finnish, apostrophes are used in the declension of foreign names or loan words that end in a consonant when written but are pronounced with a vowel ending, e.g. show'ssa ('in a show'), Bordeaux'hon ('to Bordeaux'). For Finnish as well as Swedish, there is a closely related use of the colon.
• In Polish, the apostrophe is used exclusively for marking inflections of words and word-like elements (but not acronyms – a hyphen is used instead) whose spelling conflicts with the normal rules of inflection. This mainly affects foreign words and names. For instance, one would correctly write Kampania Ala Gore'a for "Al Gore's campaign". In this example, Ala is spelt without an apostrophe, since its spelling and pronunciation fit into normal Polish rules; but Gore'a needs the apostrophe, because e disappears from the pronunciation, changing the inflection pattern. This rule is often misunderstood as calling for an apostrophe after all foreign words, regardless of their pronunciation, yielding the incorrect Kampania Al'a Gore'a, for example. The effect is akin to the greengrocers' apostrophe (see above).
• In Turkish, proper nouns are capitalised and an apostrophe is inserted between the noun and any following inflectional suffix, e.g. İstanbul'da ("in Istanbul"), contrasting with okulda ("in school", okul is a common noun) and İstanbullu ('Istanbulite', -lu is a derivational suffix).^[93]
• In Welsh the apostrophe is used with infixed pronouns in order to distinguish them from the preceding word (e.g. a'm chwaer, 'and my sister' as opposed to am chwaer, 'about a sister').

Miscellaneous uses in other languages

• In Breton, the combination c'h is used for the consonant /x/ (like ch in English Loch Ness), while ch is used for the consonant /ʃ/ (as in French chat or English she).
• In Czech, an apostrophe is used for writing to indicate spoken or informal language where the writer wants to express the natural way of informal speech, but it should not be used in formal text or text of a serious nature. E.g., instead of četl ('he read'), the word form čet' is used. Čet' is the informal variant of the verb form četl, at least in some varieties.^[94] These two words are the same in meaning, but to use the informal form gives the text a more natural tone, as though a friend were talking to you. Furthermore, the same as in the Slovak case above holds for lowercase t and d, and for the two-digit year notation.
• In Finnish, one of the consonant gradation patterns is the change of a k into a hiatus, e.g. keko → keon ('a pile' → 'a pile's'). This hiatus has to be indicated in spelling with an apostrophe if a long vowel or a diphthong would be immediately followed by the final vowel, e.g. ruoko → ruo'on, vaaka → vaa'an. (This is in contrast to compound words, where the equivalent problem is solved with a hyphen, e.g. maa-ala, 'land area'.) Similarly, the apostrophe is used to mark the hiatus (contraction) that occurs in poetry, e.g. miss' on for missä on ('where is').
• Galician restaurants sometimes use ' in their names instead of the standard article O ('the').^[95]
• In Ganda, ng' (pronounced /ŋ/) is used in place of ŋ on keyboards where this character is not available. The apostrophe distinguishes it from the letter combination ng (pronounced [ŋɡ]), which has separate use in the language. Compare this with the Swahili usage below.
• In Hebrew, the geresh (a diacritic similar to the apostrophe and often represented by one) is used for several purposes other than to mark an elision:
  • As an adjacent to letters to show sounds that are not represented in the Hebrew alphabet: Sounds such as /dʒ/ (English j as in job), /θ/ (English th as in thigh), and /tʃ/ (English ch as in check) are indicated using ג, ת, and צ with a geresh (informally chupchik). For example, the name George is spelled ג׳ורג׳ in Hebrew (with ג׳ representing the first and last consonants).
  • To denote a Hebrew numeral (e.g., נ׳, which stands for '50')
  • To denote a Hebrew letter which stands for itself (e.g., מ׳ – the letter mem)
  • Gershayim (a double geresh) to denote a Hebrew letter name (e.g., למ״ד – the letter lamedh)
  • Another (rarer) use of geresh is to denote the last syllable (which in some cases, but not all, is a suffix) in some words of Yiddish origin (e.g., חבר׳ה, מיידל׳ה).
  • In the Middle Ages and the Early modern period, gershayim were also used to denote foreign words, as well as a means of emphasis.
• In Italian, an apostrophe is sometimes used as a substitute for a grave or an acute accent after a final vowel: in capitals, or when the proper form of the letter is unavailable. So Niccolò might be rendered as Niccolo', or NICCOLO'; perché, as perche', or PERCHE'. This applies only to machine or computer writing, in the absence of a suitable keyboard.
• In Jèrriais, one of the uses of the apostrophe is to mark gemination, or consonant length: For example, t't represents /tː/, s's /sː/, n'n /nː/, th'th /ðː/, and ch'ch /ʃː/ (contrasted with /t/, /s/, /n/, /ð/, and /ʃ/).
• In standard Lojban orthography, the apostrophe is a letter in its own right (called y'y [əhə]) that can appear only between two vowels, and is phonemically realised as either [h] or, more rarely, [θ].
• In Macedonian the apostrophe is sometimes used to represent the sound schwa, which can be found on dialectal levels, but not in the Standard Macedonian.
• In Slovak, the caron over lowercase t, d, l, and uppercase L consonants resembles an apostrophe, for example, ď, ť, ľ, and Ľ. This is especially so in certain common typographic renderings. But it is non-standard to use an apostrophe instead of the caron. There is also l with an acute accent: ĺ, Ĺ. In Slovak the apostrophe is properly used only to indicate elision in certain words (tys', as an abbreviated form of ty si ('you are'), or hor' for hore ('up')); however, these elisions are restricted to poetry (with a few exceptions). Moreover, the apostrophe is also used before a two-digit year number (to indicate the omission of the first two digits): '87 (usually used for 1987).
• In Swahili, an apostrophe after ng shows that there is no sound of /ɡ/ after the /ŋ/ sound; that is, that the ng is pronounced as in English singer, not as in English finger.
• In Switzerland, the apostrophe is used as thousands separator alongside the fixed space (e.g., 2'000'000 or 7006200000000000000♠2000000 for two million) in all four national languages.
• In the new Uzbek Latin alphabet adopted in 2000, the apostrophe serves as a diacritical mark to distinguish different phonemes written with the same letter: it differentiates o' (corresponding to Cyrillic ў) from o, and g' (Cyrillic ғ) from g. This avoids the use of special characters, allowing Uzbek to be typed with ease in ordinary ASCII on any Latin keyboard. In addition, a postvocalic apostrophe in Uzbek represents the glottal stop phoneme derived from Arabic hamzah or 'ayn, replacing Cyrillic ъ.
• In English Yorkshire dialect, the apostrophe is used to represent the word the, which is contracted to a more glottal (or 'unreleased') /t/ sound. Most users will write in t'barn ('in the barn'), on t'step ('on the step'); and those unfamiliar with Yorkshire speech will often make these sound like intuh barn and ontuh step. A more accurate rendition might be in't barn and on't step, though even this does not truly convey correct Yorkshire pronunciation as the t is more like a glottal stop.
• In the pinyin (hànyǔ pīnyīn) system of romanization for Standard Chinese, an apostrophe is often loosely said to separate syllables in a word where ambiguity could arise. Example: the standard romanization for the name of the city Xī'ān includes an apostrophe to distinguish it from a single-syllable word xian. More strictly, however, it is standard to place an apostrophe only before every a, e, or o that starts a new syllable after the first if it is not preceded by a hyphen or a dash. Examples: Tiān'ānmén, Yǎ'ān; but simply Jǐnán, in which the syllables are ji and nan, since the absence of an apostrophe shows that the syllables are not jin and an (contrast Jīn'ān).^[96] This is a kind of morpheme-separation marking (see above).
• In the largely superseded Wade–Giles romanization for Standard Chinese, an apostrophe marks aspiration of the preceding consonant sound. Example: in tsê (pinyin ze) the consonant represented by ts is unaspirated, but in ts'ê (pinyin ce) the consonant represented by ts' is aspirated.
• In some systems of romanization for the Japanese, the apostrophe is used between moras in ambiguous situations, to differentiate between, for example, na and n + a. (This is similar to the practice in Pinyin mentioned above.)
• In science fiction and fantasy, the apostrophe is often used in fictional names, sometimes to indicate a glottal stop (for example Mitth'raw'nuruodo in Star Wars), but also sometimes simply for decoration.

ASCII encoding

The typewriter apostrophe ( ' ) was inherited by computer keyboards, and is the only apostrophe character available in the (7-bit) ASCII character encoding, at code value 0x27 (39). As such, it is a highly overloaded character. In ASCII, it represents a left single quotation mark, right single quotation mark, apostrophe, vertical line or prime (punctuation marks), or an acute accent (modifier letters).

Many earlier (pre-1985) computer displays and printers rendered the ASCII apostrophe as a typographic apostrophe, and rendered the ASCII grave accent ( ` ) U+0060 as a matching left single quotation mark. This allowed a more typographic appearance of text: ``I can't'' would appear as ‘‘I can’t’’ on these systems. This can still be seen in many documents prepared at that time, and is still used in the TeX typesetting system to create typographic quotes.

Typographic apostrophe in 8-bit encodings

Support for the typographic apostrophe ( ’ ) was introduced in several 8-bit character encodings, such as the Apple Macintosh operating system's Mac Roman character set (in 1984), and later in the CP1252 encoding of Microsoft Windows. Both sets also used this code point for a closing single quote. There is no such character in ISO 8859-1.

The Microsoft Windows code page CP1252 (sometimes incorrectly called ANSI or ISO-Latin) contains the typographic apostrophe at 0x92. 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. For instance, the HTML5 standard specifies that this value is interpreted as this character from CP1252.^[102] Some earlier non-Microsoft browsers would display a '?' for this and make web pages composed with Microsoft software somewhat hard to read.

Entering apostrophes

Although ubiquitous in typeset material, the typographic apostrophe ( ’ ) is rather difficult to enter on a computer, since it does not have its own key on a standard keyboard. Outside the world of professional typesetting and graphic design, many people do not know how to enter this character and instead use the typewriter apostrophe ( ' ). The typewriter apostrophe has always been considered tolerable on Web pages because of the egalitarian nature of Web publishing, the low resolution of computer monitors in comparison to print, and legacy limitations provided by ASCII.

More recently, the standard use of the typographic apostrophe is becoming more common on the Web due to the wide adoption of the Unicode text encoding standard, higher-resolution displays, and advanced anti-aliasing of text in modern operating systems. Because typewriter apostrophes are now often automatically converted to typographic apostrophes by word processing and desktop publishing software (see below), the typographic apostrophe does often appear in documents produced by non-professionals.

XML (and hence XHTML) defines an ' character entity reference for the ASCII typewriter apostrophe. ' is officially supported in HTML since HTML 5. It is not defined in HTML 4^[104] despite all the other predefined character entities from XML being defined. If it cannot be entered literally in HTML, a numeric character reference could be used instead, such as ' or '.

In the HTML entity ’ the rsquo is short for right single quotation mark.

Smart quotes

To make typographic apostrophes easier to enter, word processing and publishing software often converts typewriter apostrophes to typographic apostrophes during text entry (at the same time converting opening and closing single and double quotes to their standard left-handed or right-handed forms). A similar facility may be offered on web servers after submitting text in a form field, e.g. on weblogs or free encyclopedias. 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.

Such conversion is not always done in accordance with the standards for character sets and encodings. Additionally, many such software programs incorrectly convert a leading apostrophe to an opening quotation mark (e.g., in abbreviations of years: ‘29 rather than the correct ’29 for the years 1929 or 2029 (depending on context); or ‘twas instead of ’twas as the archaic abbreviation of it was). Smart quote features also often fail to recognise situations when a prime rather than an apostrophe is needed; for example, incorrectly rendering the latitude 49° 53′ 08″ as 49° 53’ 08".

In Microsoft Word it is possible to turn smart quotes off (in some versions, by navigating through Tools, AutoCorrect, AutoFormat as you type, and then unchecking the appropriate option). Alternatively, typing Control-Z (for Undo) immediately after entering the apostrophe will convert it back to a typewriter apostrophe. In Microsoft Word for Windows, holding down the Control key while typing two apostrophes will produce a single typographic apostrophe.

Programming

Some programming languages, like Pascal, use the ASCII apostrophe to delimit string literal. In JavaScript (and ECMAScript, which is nearly identical), Perl, PHP, and Python, and many other languages either the apostrophe or the double quote may be used, allowing string literals to contain the other character (but not to contain both without using an escape character). Some languages, such as Python or JavaScript, treat both single quotes and double quotes exactly the same; other languages, such as Perl, PHP, and many shell languages, treat single quoted strings as "raw" strings, while treating double quoted strings as "interpolated" strings.

The C programming language (like many derived languages like C++, Java, C#, and Scala) uses apostrophes to delimit a character literal. In these languages a character is a different object than a one-letter string.

In C++, since C++14, apostrophes are also used as digit separators in numeric literals.

In Visual Basic (and earlier Microsoft BASIC dialects such as QuickBASIC) an apostrophe is used to denote the start of a comment.^{[lower-alpha 8]}

In the Lisp family of programming languages, an apostrophe is a shorthand for quote operator.

In Rust, in addition to being used to delimit a character literal, an apostrophe can start an explicit lifetime.