The informal majority view (5–4, based on past writings of the justices as of 2006[update]) favoured the additional s, but a strong minority disagrees. Plural nouns ending in s. Plural nouns refer to more than one person or thing.

Plural possessive nouns are where it can get a little tricky for both native and non-native English speakers. [8], From the 16th century, following French practice, the apostrophe was used when a vowel letter was omitted either because of incidental elision (I'm for I am) or because the letter no longer represented a sound (lov'd for loved). 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.

Sona Digital Media LLC is compensated for referring traffic and business to these companies. The structure is influenced by the possessor and not the possessed. 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. This dictionary also cites a study in whose samples only 40% of the possessive forms were used to indicate actual possession.

[93][94] These authors' usages have not become widespread.

Some irregular plurals also follow patterns (source). As with most cases, rules have exceptions, and the important exception to this rule would be the possessive form of the word it.

An apostrophe is commonly used to indicate omitted characters, normally letters: The apostrophe may be used for clarity with the plurals of single letters as in, Use of the apostrophe may be recommended only for lowercase letters. [2] Personal pronouns, however, have irregular possessives, and most of them have different forms for possessive determiners and possessive pronouns, such as my and mine or your and yours.

“Although” and “but” are both conjunctions, which are words that we use to glue sentences and ideas together. "[4] The Chicago Manual of Style recommends this style, while stating that adding just an apostrophe (e.g. Nibbles’s feathers are green.

The plural use was greatly reduced, but a need was felt to mark possessive plural. (The form the king's horse of England was the correct form in old times,[when?]

We use the possessive form with of mostly for inanimate objects.

The . The structure can be used for a whole phrase: We very often use possessive 's with names: When a name ends in s, we usually treat it like any other singular noun, and add 's: But it is possible (especially with older, classical names) to just add the apostrophe ': Some nouns have irregular plural forms without s (man → men). "[88], The United States Board on Geographic Names discourages the use of possessive apostrophes in geographic names (see above),[89] though state agencies do not always conform; Vermont's official state website provides information concerning Camel's Hump State Forest.


We can also use the preposition of to express possession. (= exclamation of exasperation). However, people’s is the possessive of the word people — the plural of person.

In that case, the letter 'ayn (Arabic ع and Hebrew ע) is correspondingly transliterated with the opening single quotation mark.

Answer: The traditions belong to the peoples. And I think this website is a good one. ). To make sure that you understand the correct answers, our answer keys offer simple explanations as well as handy tips and tricks.

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).

This page was last edited on 2 August 2020, at 20:59.

George Bernard Shaw, a proponent of English spelling reform on phonetic principles, argued that the apostrophe was mostly redundant. For example, the phrase the king of Spain can form the possessive the king of Spain's, and – in informal style – the phrase the man we saw yesterday can form the man we saw yesterday's. For example, the French word pin's (from English pin) is used (with the apostrophe in both singular and plural) for collectible lapel pins. English spelling retained many inflections that were not pronounced as syllables, notably verb endings (-est, -eth, -es, -ed) and the noun ending -es, which marked either plurals or possessives (also known as genitives; see Possessive apostrophe, below). Other pronouns that form possessives (mainly indefinite pronouns) do so in the same way as nouns, with 's, for example one's, somebody's (and somebody else's). In his book Troublesome Words, author Bill Bryson lambastes Tesco for this, stating that "the mistake is inexcusable, and those who make it are linguistic Neanderthals. All rights reserved. Here are some you might recognize: Some words that sound like they should be irregular are actually regular. 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. For example: Rather than ʿ (modifier letter left half ring), the apostrophe is sometimes used to indicate a voiced pharyngeal fricative as it sounds and looks like the glottal stop to most English speakers.

The apostrophe in the name of rock band The La's is often thought to be misused, but in fact it marks omission of the letter d. The name comes from the Scouse slang for lads. Place names in the United States do not use the possessive apostrophe on federal maps and signs.



In these languages a character is a different object than a one-letter string. The television belongs to Warren. In contrast, peoples’ is the possessive of the word peoples — used to refer to groups of people. See English determiners for more details.

The ending -e was used for strong nouns with Germanic ō-stems, which constituted most of the feminine strong nouns, and for the feminine genitive singular form of strong adjectives. This means when it becomes possessive, it gets the same treatment as its singular form. Jack's and your dogs), but there is a tendency to avoid this construction, too, in favour of a construction that does not use a coordinate possessive (e.g. §6.2.

In informal contexts, the simple typewriter apostrophe ' is commonly substituted for any of a variety of similar marks and their formal purposes.

", 2.

You can see that example 1 refers to a group of people, while example 2 refers to many peoples. The possessive is also used to refer to shops, restaurants, churches and colleges, using the name or job title of the owner.

However, debate has been going on regarding the punctuation of St James' Park (Newcastle) for some time, unlike St James's Park (London) which is the less contentious version. Simply changing the name of the genitive does not change or eliminate any of its multiple functions. When we want to show that something belongs to somebody or something, we usually add an apostrophe + s ('s) to a singular noun and an apostrophe (') to a plural noun, for example: the boy's ball (one boy) the boys' ball (two or more boys) Notice that the number of balls does not matter. but not now.

I am a career educator and have served at the classroom, administrative, and university levels. For example: Possessives are one of the means by which genitive constructions are formed in modern English, the other principal one being the use of the preposition of.
The possessive form of an English noun, or more generally a noun phrase, is made by suffixing a morpheme which is represented orthographically as 's (the letter s preceded by an apostrophe), and is pronounced in the same way as the regular English plural ending (e)s: namely as /ɪz/ when following a sibilant sound (/s/, /z/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/, /tʃ/ or /dʒ/), as /s/ when following any other voiceless consonant (/p/, /t/, /k/, /f/ or /θ/), and as /z/ otherwise.

For instance, the HTML5 standard specifies that this value is interpreted as this character from CP1252. This punctuation is preferred in major style guides. I'm Dr. Patrick Capriola, a father of two girls who is always looking for ways to be a better dad.

Instead, in most cases, you will probably use the possessive form, people’s.

"[17] Cf.

Your confusion is understandable.