The apostrophe | Learn English | Canguro English

Join Raquel and I as we study the apostrophe. Don't forget to read the notes below. See you in class!

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There is probably nothing that inspires more fear and confusion in the English language than the apostrophe. The situation is so bad that even the English themselves have trouble using it and it's common to see such serious errors as;

Tea's coffee's and snack's
Spring is on it's way
Ladie's night
There is even an International Apostrophe Day to try to raise awareness of how to use the apostrophe correctly.

But it's really not that difficult. Now we are going to learn what apostrophes are, what we use them for, and how easy it is to use them correctly.

WHAT IS AN APOSTROPHE?

In English an apostrophe has two uses;

to show where letters have been removed
to indicate the possessive
Let's look in more detail at these two uses.

TO SHOW LETTERS HAVE BEEN REMOVED

In English we use a lot of contractions. They can be formal or informal, such as;

He ain't listening (is not)
Please don't do that (do not)
I wish she'd go home (she would)
The weather's terrible today (weather is)
This is the easiest and most common use of the apostrophe. But we can also remove letters at the beginning or end of words, like this;

I was born in the '90s (1990s)
I am hungry 'cos I didn't eat breakfast (because)
I've been drinkin' all day (drinking)
Usually these types of contractions are informal, so we use them mainly when speaking, and definitely not in formal writing.

TO INDICATE THE POSSESSIVE

This is probably the type of apostrophe that causes the most confusion.

Let's imagine we have a friend called Dave. And Dave has a cat. We could say;

The cat of Dave
But remember that we are lazy and we want to speak in the fastest way possible, so it is much more natural to say;

Dave's cat
So we add an apostrophe and an s before cat to show it belongs to Dave. But what about multiple possessives, for example;

The cat of the friend of the sister of Dave
In this case we add our 's to everything, but in reverse order. For example;

Dave's sister's friend's cat

POSSESSIVES ENDING WITH S AND PLURAL POSSESSIVES

This is another source of confusion. What do we do if the possessive ends with an S? For example, let's imagine our friend Carlos has a cat. We could say;

The cat of Carlos
Or, more naturally;

Carlos' cat
Carlos's cat
So you can see that we have the choice to put two Ss or simply one. The same goes for plural possessives ending in S;

The soldiers' guns were new (the guns of the soldiers)
The actresses's awards were very heavy (the awards of the actresses)
But be careful with English mass nouns. Mass nouns are plurals but don't always end in S;

The children's toys (not the childrens' toys)
Remember that depending on where we put our apostrophe indicates a singular or plural possessive;

The teacher marked the student's homework (one student)
The teacher marked the students' homework (more than one student)

THE MOST COMMON MISTAKES

Sometimes people think that we use an apostrophe to make plurals, but we never use the apostrophe to make plurals. The most common and most hated apostrophe mistakes in English are these:

The dog ate it's food (its - using contraction instead of possessive)
There are 7 apple's for sale (apples - using the apostrophe to make a plural)
The 5 astronaut's helmets were incredible (astronauts' - using apostrophe for singular instead of plural)