With place names this rule is not always adhered to: Sicilies and Scillies are the standard plurals of Sicily and Scilly, while Germanys and Germanies are both used. For guidelines on apostrophe usage in Wikipedia, see, ἡ á¼ÏÏÏÏÏοÏÎ¿Ï [ÏÏοÏῳδία], General principles for the possessive apostrophe, With other punctuation; compounds with pronouns, Singular nouns ending with an "s" or "z" sound, Superfluous apostrophes ("greengrocers' apostrophes"), As a mark of palatalization or non-palatalization, Typographic apostrophe in 8-bit encodings, This is standard even though the possessive word, As a comment character in MS BASIC, the apostrophe is in most cases an abbreviation of the REM statement, which can be appended to the end of almost any line with a colon (:). An apostrophe is used in time and money references in constructions such as one hour's respite, two weeks' holiday, a dollar's worth, five pounds' worth, one mile's drive from here. This is because Attic Greek is what is taught in classes in Greek in Western Europe, and therefore was the Greek that the word borrowers knew. Some people treat process as if it belonged to this class, pronouncing processes /ˈprɒsᵻsiːz/ instead of standard /ˈprɒsɛsᵻz/. heads of state): With extended compounds constructed around o, only the last term is pluralized (or left unchanged if it is already plural): See also the Headless nouns section below. Modern French orthography has restored the spelling une heure. Many earlier (pre-1985) computer displays and printers rendered the ASCII apostrophe as a typographic apostrophe, and rendered the grave accent ` ('back tick',0x60, 96) as a matching left single quotation mark. Others, such as aesthetics, are less strongly or consistently felt as singular; for the latter type, the dictionary phrase "plural in form but singular or plural in construction" recognizes variable usage. However, this was not universally accepted until the mid-19th century. Some people extend this use of the apostrophe to other cases, such as plurals of numbers written in figures (e.g. It is standard meaning the form of money, where it derives from the Latin singular ablative in the phrase in specie. Thus, as H. W. Fowler describes, in British English they are "treated as singular or plural at discretion"; Fowler notes that occasionally a "delicate distinction" is made possible by discretionary plurals: "The Cabinet is divided is better, because in the order of thought a whole must precede division; and The Cabinet are agreed is better, because it takes two or more to agree."[25]. Likewise, a radio or radar engineer works with antennas, but an entomologist deals with antennae. For these, see § Teams and their members below. [15][16] The inflection of both is normally preferred (e.g. Fishes is also used in iconic contexts, such as the Bible story of the loaves and fishes, or the reference in The Godfather, "Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.". He did not use it for spelling cant, hes, etc., in many of his writings. Some words of foreign origin are much better known in their (foreign-morphology) plural form, and are often not even recognized by English speakers as having plural form; descriptively, in English morphology many of these simply are not in plural form, because English has naturalized the foreign plural as the English singular. 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. 's railway station"; "Awaye! The 11th edition of the standard Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (2006) lists film noirs as the preferred style. In Russian and some derived alphabets, the same function has been served by the, As an adjacent to letters to show sounds that are not represented in the. Because typewriter apostrophes are now often automatically converted to typographic apostrophes by word processing and desktop publishing software, the typographic apostrophe does often appear in documents produced by non-professionals, albeit sometimes incorrectlyâsee the section "Smart Quotes" below. Italian nouns, notably technical terms in music and art, often retain the Italian plurals: Nouns from languages other than the above generally form plurals as if they were native English words: Unlike other compounds borrowed directly from French. In the case of /f/ changing to /v/, the mutation is indicated in the orthography as well; also, a silent e is added in this case if the singular does not already end with -e: In addition, there is one word where /s/ is voiced in the plural:[5]. 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. 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: The apostrophe represents sounds resembling the glottal stop in the Turkic languages and in some romanizations of Semitic languages, including Arabic and Hebrew. The author and language commentator Anu Garg, in a humorous but well-argued discussion, has called for the abolition of the apostrophe, stating "Some day this world would be free of metastatic cancers, narcissistic con men, and the apostrophe. Gratuit. These words are usually marked in dictionaries with the phrase "plural in form but singular in construction" (or similar wording). Scientific abbreviations for words of Latin origin ending in -a, such as SN for supernova, can form a plural by adding -e, as SNe for supernovae. In some cases, a plural verb can be used when the answer is expected to be plural[26], When followed by a plural predicative complement, a plural verb must be used:[26], Following which, a singular verb suggests a singular answer, and a plural verb suggests a plural answer:[26]. A single piece of data is sometimes referred to as a, "Sometimes scientists think of data as plural, as in, "...of the 136 distinguished consultants on usage polled for the 1975 Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage, 49% responded that they use "The data is..." in writing. ("lines"), ff. 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). Learn more. Some writers like to reflect standard spoken practice in cases like these with sake: for convenience' sake, for goodness' sake, for appearance' sake, for compromise' sake, etc. Some programming languages, like Pascal, use the ASCII apostrophe to delimit string literals. [35] Still others prefer to omit the apostrophe when there is an s sound before sake: for morality's sake, but for convenience sake. Mongeese is a back-formation by mistaken analogy to goose / geese and is often used in a jocular context. Place names in the United States do not use the possessive apostrophe on federal maps and signs. You'll probably never hear anyone ask: "Are the agenda interesting? [24] In the examples below, the original plural is now commonly used as a singular, and in some cases a regular English plural (effectively a double plural) has been formed from it. [41] The United States Board on Geographic Names, which has responsibility for formal naming of municipalities and geographic features, has deprecated the use of possessive apostrophes since 1890 so as not to show ownership of the place. Classical Greek had a simpler system, but still more complicated than that of English. (For another kind of morphemic separation see pinyin, below.). In the 2nd one Iâd also pick singular as target âaudienceâ is a collective noun. [6], The use of elision has continued to the present day, but significant changes have been made to the possessive and plural uses. for this and make web pages composed with Microsoft software somewhat hard to read. English has borrowed a great many words from Classical Latin and Classical Greek. Nouns describing things having two parts are expressed in the singular when used as adjectives. Referring to the musical style as a whole. The apostrophe was first used by Pietro Bembo in his edition of De Aetna (1496). Many nouns ending in /f/ or /θ/ (including all words where /f/ is represented orthographically by gh or ph) nevertheless retain the voiceless consonant: There are many other less regular ways of forming plurals, usually stemming from older forms of English or from foreign borrowings. See Smart quotes for examples. In ASCII, it may be used to represent any of left single quotation mark, right single quotation mark, apostrophe, vertical line or prime (punctuation marks), or an acute accent (modifier letters). Compose'> or Words ending in a y preceded by a vowel form their plurals by adding -s: However the plural form (rarely used) of money is usually monies, although moneys is also found. (This does not always apply; for example, there is the Minnesota Lynx, not *Lynxes.) (For example, in the USA and UK, the notation 5â² 7â³ signifies 5 feet and 7 inches}. The apostrophe (' or â) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. and a Japanese dance group called Super Monkey's. Truss says this usage is no longer considered proper in formal writing. In that case, the letter 'ayn (Arabic ع and Hebrew ×¢) is correspondingly transliterated with the opening single quotation mark. Such usage is common with the definite article, to denote people of a certain type generally: the unemployed, the homeless. [96] In a letter to the English Journal, Peter Brodie stated that apostrophes are "largely decorative ... [and] rarely clarify meaning". Note that most loan words from Greek in English are from Attic Greek (the Athenian Greek of Plato, Aristotle, and other "great" writers), not Demotic Greek, Koine (Biblical) Greek, or Modern Greek. 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). This concept can be aggravating for French learners, but with patience and practice you'll be able to describe any object like a natural. The noun is normally used anyway when referring to specific sets of people (five Frenchmen, a few Spaniards), although the adjective may be used especially in case of a group of mixed or unspecified sex, if the demonym nouns are gender-specific: there were five French (or French people) in the bar (if neither Frenchmen or Frenchwomen would be appropriate). 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. How English plurals are formed; typically -(e)s, Singulars as plural and plurals as singular, Plural in form but singular in construction, Singulars with collective meaning treated as plural. Some of these words, such as news, are strongly and consistently felt as singular by fluent speakers. Other examples include ll. it designates the combined set of Jack's children and Jill's children. Certain adjectives can be used, uninflected, as plurals denoting people of the designated type. Adrian Room, in his English Journal article "Axing the Apostrophe", argued that apostrophes are unnecessary, and context will resolve any ambiguity. 's), or where the last letter is S (as in PS's and CAS's, although PSs and CASs are also acceptable; the ending -es is also sometimes seen). It was originally plural, but in French and English it is always regarded as singular. The choice of a form can often depend on context: for a scholar, the plural of appendix is appendices (following the original language); for some physicians, the plural of appendix is appendixes. These are nouns and are pluralized in typical fashion: Some compounds have one head with which they begin. Such conversion is not always correct. Writing Systems and Punctuation. For possessive plurals of words ending in a silent x, z or s, the few authorities that address the issue at all typically call for an added s and suggest that the apostrophe precede the s: The Loucheux's homeland is in the Yukon; Compare the two Dumas's literary achievements. The solution was to use an apostrophe after the plural s (as in girls' dresses). However, when entering English, the final s of chupacabras was treated as a plural of the compound (i.e. There are also some plural nouns whose singular forms exist, though they are much more rarely encountered than the plurals: Mass nouns (or uncountable nouns) do not represent distinct objects, so the singular and plural semantics do not apply in the same way. Simply changing the name of the genitive does not change or eliminate any of its multiple functions. Exceptions are accounted for in the same way: three months pregnant (in modern usage, one says neither pregnant of three months, nor one month(')s pregnant). This may cause confusion for those familiar with the Classical Latin pronunciation /ænˈtɛnaɪ/. )", Unicode input#In X11 (Linux and other Unix variants), The Dreaded Apostrophe: An approach using a single rule only, A humorous guide to proper and improper usage of the apostrophe, Humble apostrophe reprieved in council U-turn |The Times, The Ultimate Flowchart to Using Apostrophes (Infographic), https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Apostrophe&oldid=1005618373, Articles containing Spanish-language text, Articles with dead external links from May 2012, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles which use infobox templates with no data rows, Articles containing Ancient Greek (to 1453)-language text, Articles containing Old English (ca. Similarly, there is an Andorran football club called FC Rà nger's (after such British clubs as Rangers F.C.) In Old and Middle English, voiceless fricatives /f/ and /θ/ mutated to voiced fricatives /v/ and /ð/ respectively before a voiced ending. "1990's"), words used as terms (e.g. Other nouns that have identical singular and plural forms include: Many names for Native American peoples are not inflected in the plural: Exceptions include Algonquins, Apaches, Aztecs, Chippewas, Hurons, Incas, Mohawks, Oneidas, and Seminoles. [76], Apostrophes used in a non-standard manner to form noun plurals are known as greengrocers' apostrophes or grocers' apostrophes, often written as greengrocer's apostrophes[79] or grocer's apostrophes. Because many of these plurals do not end in -s, some of them have been reinterpreted as singular forms: particularly the words datum and medium (as in a "medium of communication"), where the original plurals data and media are now, in many contexts, used by some as singular mass nouns: "The media is biased"; "This data shows us that ..." (although a number of scientists, especially of British origin, still say "These data show us that ..."). Words such as army, company, crowd, family, fleet, government, majority, mess, number, pack, party and team may refer either to a single entity or the members of the set composing it. In German an apostrophe is used almost exclusively to indicate omitted letters. Many of these are the names of animals: As a general rule, game or other animals are often referred to in the singular for the plural in a sporting context: "He shot six brace of pheasant", "Carruthers bagged a dozen tiger last year", whereas in another context such as zoology or tourism the regular plural would be used. (And why the Unicode committee is very wrong. [15], When a coordinate possessive construction has two personal pronouns, the normal possessive inflection is used, and there is no apostrophe (e.g. In many languages, including JavaScript, ECMAScript, and Python, 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), e.g. Many English compounds have been borrowed directly from French, and these generally follow a somewhat different set of rules. Colloquial usages based in a humorous fashion on the second declension include Elvii (better Latin would be Elvēs or Elvidēs) to refer to multiple Elvis impersonators and Loti, used by petrolheads to refer to Lotus automobiles in the plural. Style guides typically advise consulting an official source for the standard form of the name (as one would do if uncertain about other aspects of the spelling of the name); some tend towards greater prescriptiveness, for or against such an apostrophe. These heads are also nouns and the head usually pluralizes, leaving the second, usually a post-positive adjective, term unchanged: It is common in informal speech to pluralize the last word instead, like most English nouns, but in edited prose aimed at educated people, the forms given above are usually preferred. However, if it has already been established that one item was in question, one can use no to deny that such an item exists in the singular: The interrogative pronouns who and what generally take singular agreement,[26] e.g. General Punctuation", "1 IDN Variant TLDs â Cyrillic Script Issues" (6 October 2011), "Which Unicode character should represent the English apostrophe? Use of the apostrophe is more common in those cases where the letters are followed by periods (B.A. [36], The Supreme Court of the United States is split on whether a possessive singular noun that ends with s should always have an additional s after the apostrophe, sometimes have an additional s after the apostrophe (for instance, based on whether the final sound of the original word is pronounced /s/ or /z/), or never have an additional s after the apostrophe.