Apostrophe


The apostrophe 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 two 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
It is also used in a few exceptional cases for the marking of plurals, e.g., "p's and q's" or Oakland A's.
The same mark is used as a single quotation mark. It is also substituted informally for other marks for example instead of the prime symbol to indicate the units of foot or minutes of arc.
The word apostrophe comes from the Greek language|Greek] ἡ ἀπόστροφος , through Latin and French.

Usage in English

Historical development

The apostrophe was first used by Pietro Bembo in his edition of De Aetna. It was introduced into English in the 16th century in imitation of French practice.

French practice

Introduced by Geoffroy Tory, the apostrophe was used in place of a vowel letter to indicate elision. It was also frequently used in place of a final when it was elided before a vowel, as in un' heure. Modern French orthography has restored the spelling une heure.

Early English practice

From the 16th century, following French practice, the apostrophe was used when a vowel letter was omitted either because of incidental elision or because the letter no longer represented a sound. English spelling retained many inflections that were not pronounced as syllables, notably verb endings and the noun ending "-es", which marked either plurals or possessives, also known as genitives. An apostrophe followed by was often used to mark a plural; specifically, the Oxford Companion to the English Language notes that:

Standardisation

The use of elision has continued to the present day, but significant changes have been made to the possessive and plural uses. By the 18th century, an apostrophe with the addition of an was regularly used for all possessive singular forms, even when the letter was not omitted. This was regarded as representing not the elision of the in the "-e" or "-es" ending of the word being pluralized, but the elision of the from the Old English genitive singular inflection "-es".
The plural genitive did not use the "-es" inflection, and since many plural forms already consisted of the "-s" or "-es" ending, using the apostrophe in place of the elisioned could lead to singular and plural possessives of a given word having the exact same spelling. The solution was to use an apostrophe after the plural . However, this was not universally accepted until the mid-19th century. Plurals not ending in -s keep the -'s marker, such as "children's toys, the men's toilet", since there was no risk of ambiguity.

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, expresses relationships other than possession. For example, in the expressions "the school's headmaster", "the men's department", and "tomorrow's weather", the school does not own/possess the headmaster, men do not own/possess the department, and tomorrow does not/will not own the weather. In the words of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage:
That dictionary also cites a study that found that only 40% of the possessive forms were used to indicate actual possession.
The modern spelling convention distinguishes possessive singular forms from simple plural forms, and both of those from possessive plural forms. For example, the word "glass's" is the singular possessive form of the noun "glass". The plural form of "glass" is "glasses" and the plural possessive form is, therefore, "glasses. One would therefore say "I drank the glass's contents" to indicate drinking from one glass, but "I drank the glasses' contents" after also drinking from another glass.
For singular forms, the modern possessive or genitive inflection is a survival from certain genitive inflections in Old English, for which the apostrophe originally marked the loss of the old . Its use for indicating plural "possessive" forms was not standard before the middle of the 19th century.

General principles for the possessive apostrophe

Summary of rules for most situations
  • Possessive personal pronouns, serving as either noun-equivalents or adjective-equivalents, do not use an apostrophe, even when they end in. The complete list of those ending in the letter or the corresponding sound or but not taking an apostrophe is "ours", "yours", "his", "hers", "its", "theirs", and "whose".
  • Other pronouns, singular nouns not ending in, and plural nouns not ending in all take s" in the possessive: e.g., "someone's", "a cat's toys", "women's".
  • Plural nouns already ending in take only an apostrophe after the pre-existing to form the possessive: e.g., "three cats' toys".
    Basic rule (singular nouns)
For most singular nouns, the ending s" is added; e.g., "the cat's whiskers".
  • If a singular noun ends with an -sound, practice varies as to whether to add s" or the apostrophe alone. In many cases, both spoken and written forms differ between writers.
  • Acronyms and initialisms used as nouns follow the same rules as singular nouns: e.g., "the TV's picture quality".
    Basic rule (plural nouns)
When the noun is a normal plural, with an added, no extra is added in the possessive, and it is pronounced accordingly; so "the neighbours' garden" is standard rather than "the neighbours's garden".
  • If the plural is not one that is formed by adding, an is added for the possessive, after the apostrophe: "children's hats", "women's hairdresser", "some people's eyes". These principles are universally accepted.
  • A few English nouns have plurals that are not spelled with a final but nevertheless end in an or a sound: "mice", "dice", "pence". In the absence of specific exceptional treatment in style guides, the possessives of these plurals are formed by adding an apostrophe and an in the standard way: "seven titmice's tails were found", "the dice's last fall was a seven", "his few pence's value was not enough to buy bread". These would often be rephrased, where possible: "the last fall of the dice was a seven".
    Basic rule (compound nouns)
Compound nouns have their singular possessives formed with an apostrophe and an added, in accordance with the rules given above: the Attorney-General's husband; the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports's prerogative; this Minister for Justice's intervention; her father-in-law's new wife.
  • In such examples, the plurals are formed with an that does not occur at the end: e.g., attorneys-general. A problem therefore arises with the possessive plurals of these compounds. Sources that rule on the matter appear to favour the following forms, in which there is both an added to form the plural, and a separate added for the possessive: the attorneys-general's husbands; successive Ministers for Justice's interventions; their fathers-in-law's new wives. Because these constructions stretch the resources of punctuation beyond comfort, in practice they are normally reworded: interventions by successive Ministers for Justice.
    Joint or separate possession
For two nouns joined by and, there are several ways of expressing possession, including:
Some grammars make no distinction in meaning between the two forms. Some publishers' style guides, however, make a distinction, assigning the "segregatory" meaning to the form "John's and Mary's" and the "combinatorial" meaning to the form "John and Mary's". A third alternative is a construction of the form "Jack's children and Jill's", which is always distributive, i.e. it designates the combined set of Jack's children and Jill's children.
When a coordinate possessive construction has two personal pronouns, the normal possessive inflection is used, and there is no apostrophe. The issue of the use of the apostrophe arises when the coordinate construction includes a noun and a pronoun. In this case, the inflection of only the last item may sometimes be, at least marginally, acceptable. The inflection of both is normally preferred, but there is a tendency to avoid this construction, too, in favour of a construction that does not use a coordinate possessive. Where a construction like "Jack's and your dogs" is used, the interpretation is usually "segregatory".
With other punctuation; compounds with pronouns
If the word or compound includes, or ends with, a punctuation mark, an apostrophe and an are still added in the usual way: "Westward Ho!'s railway station"; "Awaye!s Paulette Whitten recorded Bob Wilson's story"; Washington, D.C.'s museums..
  • If the word or compound already includes a possessive apostrophe, a double possessive results: Tom's sisters' careers; the head of marketing's husband's preference; the master of foxhounds' best dog's death. Many style guides, while allowing that these constructions are possible, advise rephrasing: the head of marketing's husband prefers that .... If an original apostrophe or apostrophe with occurs at the end, it is left by itself to serve both purposes: Our employees are better paid than McDonald's employees; Standard & Poor's indices are widely used: the fixed forms of McDonald's and Standard & Poor's already include possessive apostrophes. For similar cases involving geographical names, see below.
  • Similarly, the possessives of all phrases whose wording is fixed are formed in the same way:
  • *"Us and Thems inclusion on the album The Dark Side of the Moon
  • *You Am I's latest CD
  • *The 69'ers' drummer, Tom Callaghan
  • * His 'n' Hers's first track is called "Joyriders".
  • * Was She success greater, or King Solomon's Mines?
    Time, money, and similar
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 like an ordinary possessive use. For example, one hour's respite means a respite of one hour.
Possessive pronouns and adjectives
No apostrophe is used in the following possessive pronouns and adjectives: hers, his, its, my, mine, ours, theirs, whose, and yours. All other possessive pronouns do end with an apostrophe and an. In singular forms, the apostrophe comes first, e.g. one's; everyone's; somebody's, nobody else's, etc., while the apostrophe follows the in plural forms as with nouns: the others' complaints.
The possessive of it was originally it's, in contrast to the modern its. The apostrophe was dropped by the early 19th century. Authorities are now unanimous that it's can be only a contraction of it is or it has. Despite this, using it's as a possessive pronoun is a common grammatical error in present times.
Importance for disambiguation
Each of these four phrases has a distinct meaning:
  • My sister's friend's investment '
  • My sister's friends' investment '
  • My sisters' friend's investment '
  • My sisters' friends' investment '
Kingsley Amis, on being challenged to produce a sentence whose meaning depended on a possessive apostrophe, came up with:
  • Those things over there are my husband's.
  • Those things over there are my husbands'.
  • Those things over there are my husbands.

    Singular nouns ending with an ⟨s⟩ or ⟨z⟩ sound

Some singular nouns are pronounced with a sibilant sound at the end: or. The spelling of these ends with -s, -se, -z, -ze, -ce, -x, or -xe.
Most respected authorities recommend that practically all singular nouns, including those ending with a sibilant sound, have possessive forms with an extra after the apostrophe so that the spelling reflects the underlying pronunciation. Examples include Oxford University Press, the Modern Language Association, the BBC and The Economist. Such authorities demand possessive singulars like these: Bridget Jones's Diary; Tony Adams's friend; my boss's job; the US's economy. Rules that modify or extend the standard principle have included the following:
Although less common, some contemporary writers still follow the older practice of omitting the second s in some cases ending with a sibilant, but usually not when written -x or -xe. proper nouns ending with an, but not in words ending with other sibilants. The 15th edition of [The Chicago Manual of Style">The Associated Press Stylebook recommends or allows the practice of omitting the additional in proper nouns ending with an, but not in words ending with other sibilants. The 15th edition of [The Chicago Manual of Style had recommended the traditional practice, which included providing for several exceptions to accommodate spoken usage such as the omission of the extra after a polysyllabic word ending in a sibilant, but the 16th edition no longer recommends omitting the possessive.
Similar examples of notable names ending in an that are often given a possessive apostrophe with no additional include Dickens and Williams. There is often a policy of leaving off the additional on any such name, but this can prove problematic when specific names are contradictory. However, debate has been going on regarding the punctuation of St James' Park for some time, unlike St James's Park which is the less contentious version. For more details on practice with geographic names, see the relevant section below.
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. This punctuation is preferred in major style guides. Others prefer to add 's: for convenience's sake. Still others prefer to omit the apostrophe when there is an sound before sake: for morality's sake, but for convenience sake.

Nouns ending with silent ⟨s⟩, ⟨x⟩, or ⟨z⟩

The English possessive of French nouns ending in a silent,, or is addressed by various style guides. Certainly a sibilant is pronounced in examples like Descartes's and Dumas's; the question addressed here is whether needs to be added. Similar examples with or : Sauce Périgueux's main ingredient is truffle; His pince-nez's loss went unnoticed; "Verreaux eagle, a large, predominantly black eagle, Aquila verreauxi,..." ; in each of these some writers might omit the added. The same principles and residual uncertainties apply with "naturalised" English words, like Illinois and Arkansas.
For possessive plurals of words ending in a silent, or, the few authorities that address the issue at all typically call for an added and suggest that the apostrophe precede the : The Loucheux's homeland is in the Yukon; Compare the two Dumas's literary achievements. The possessive of a cited French title with a silent plural ending is uncertain: "Trois femmes's long and complicated publication history", but "Les noces' singular effect was 'exotic primitive'...". Compare treatment of other titles, above.
Guides typically seek a principle that will yield uniformity, even for foreign words that fit awkwardly with standard English punctuation.

Possessives in geographic names

Place names in the United States do not use the possessive apostrophe on federal maps and signs. 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. Only five names of natural features in the US are officially spelled with a genitive apostrophe: Martha's Vineyard; Ike's Point, New Jersey; John E's Pond, Rhode Island; Carlos Elmer's Joshua View, Arizona; and Clark's Mountain, Oregon. Some municipalities, originally incorporated using the apostrophe, have dropped it in accordance with this policy; Taylors Falls in Minnesota, for example, was originally incorporated as "Taylor's Falls". On the state level, the federal policy is not always followed: Vermont's official state website has a page on Camel's Hump State Forest.
Australia's Intergovernmental Committee on Surveying and Mapping also has a no-apostrophe policy, a practice it says goes back to the 1900s and which is generally followed around the country.
On the other hand, the United Kingdom has Bishop's Stortford, Bishop's Castle and King's Lynn but St Albans, St Andrews and St Helens. London Underground's Piccadilly line has the adjacent stations of Earl's Court in Earl's Court and Barons Court. These names were mainly fixed in form many years before grammatical rules were fully standardised. While Newcastle United play football at a stadium called St James' Park, and Exeter City at St James Park, London has a St James's Park.
Modern usage has been influenced by considerations of technological convenience including the economy of typewriter ribbons and films, and similar computer character "disallowance" which tend to ignore past standards. Practice in the United Kingdom and Canada is not so uniform.

Possessives in names of organizations

Sometimes the apostrophe is omitted in the names of clubs, societies, and other organizations, even though the standard principles seem to require it: Country Women's Association, but International Aviation Association; Magistrates' Court of Victoria, but Federated Ship [Painters and Dockers Union]. Usage is variable and inconsistent. Style guides typically advise consulting an official source for the standard form of the name ; some tend towards greater prescriptiveness, for or against such an apostrophe. As the case of shows, it is not possible to analyze these forms simply as non-possessive plurals, since women is the only correct plural form of woman.

Possessives in business names

Where a business name is based on a family name it should in theory take an apostrophe, but many leave it out. 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 at the end is also a name, such as Parson. A small activist group called the Apostrophe Protection Society 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." 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.
  • 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, 'phone, 'net. However, if the shortening is unusual, dialectal or archaic, the apostrophe may still be used to mark it. 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, 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. 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", but this has been superseded by shan't.
  • *Shortenings with more apostrophes, such as y'all'dn't've, are possible, particularly in Southern US dialects.
  • It is sometimes used when the normal form of an inflection seems awkward or unnatural; for example, KO'd rather than KOed ; "a spare pince-nez'd man".
  • An apostrophe's function as possessive or contractive can depend on the grammatical context:
  • *We rehearsed for Friday's opening night.
  • *We rehearsed because Friday's opening night.
  • 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 for example, Wolverhampton abbreviated as "W'hampton" and Kidderminster as "K'minster".
  • The United States Board on Geographic Names, while discouraging possessive apostrophes in place names, allows apostrophes indicating omission, as in "Lake O' the Woods", or when normally present in a surname, as in "O'Malley Draw".

    Use in forming some plurals

Following an evolution in usage in the 20th century, today "the apostrophe of plurality continues in at least five areas": abbreviations, letters of the alphabet/small words, numbers, family names, and in non-standard use.

Abbreviations

For abbreviations, including acronyms, the use of s without an apostrophe is now more common than its use with an apostrophe. Most modern style guides disparage the use of apostrophes in all plural abbreviations.
Some references continue to condone their use, or even recommend their use in some abbreviations. For example, The Canadian Style states "Add an apostrophe and s to form the plural of abbreviations containing more than one period", so G.M.'s is preferred to G.M.s. The Oxford Companion to the English Language condones V.I.P.'s, VIP's, and VIPs equally.

Letters of the alphabet, and small words

For single lowercase letters, pluralization with 's is usual. Many guides recommend apostrophes whether the single letters are lowercase or uppercase. The Chicago Manual of Style recommends the apostrophe of plurality only for lowercase letters. Sometimes, adding just s rather than 's may leave meaning ambiguous or presentation inelegant. However, an apostrophe is not always the preferred solution. APA style requires the use of italics instead of an apostrophe: ps, ns, etc.
In the phrase dos and don'ts, most modern style guides disparage spelling the first word as do's. However, there is a lack of consensus and certainly the use of an apostrophe continues, legitimately, in which "the apostrophe of plurality occurs in the first word but not the second".

Numbers and symbols

The Oxford Companion to the English Language notes that "a plural s after a set of numbers is often preceded by an apostrophe, as in 3's and 4's..., but many housestyles and individuals now favour 3s and 4s". Most style guides prefer the lack of apostrophe for groups of years and will prefer 90s or '90s over 90's or '90's.
While many guides discourage using an apostrophe in all numbers/dates, many other guides encourage using an apostrophe for numbers or are divided on the issue; for example, the Australian Government Style Manual recommends "Binary code uses 0’s and 1’s" but recommends "the 2020s". Still other guides take a laissez-faire approach. For example, the University of Sussex's online guide notes regional variation in the use of apostrophes in dates, and slightly prefers 1's and 7's over 1s and 7s but condones both.
The apostrophe is very 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. The addition of an s without an apostrophe may make the text difficult to read.
For many numbers and symbols, a useful alternative is to write out the numbers as words.

Family names

The vast majority of English references published from the late 20th century onwards disparage the use of apostrophes in family-name plurals, for example identifying Joneses as correct and Jones's as incorrect. As an exception, the Oxford Companion to the English Language reports that, in addition to Joneses etc., standard apostrophe usage does continue "in family names, especially if they end in -s, as in keeping up with the Jones's".

Nonstandard use

See, [|below].

Use in non-English names

Names that are not strictly native to English sometimes have an apostrophe substituted to represent other characters.
  • Anglicised versions of Irish surnames typically contain an apostrophe after an O, for example "Dara [Ó Briain|Dara O'Briain]" for Dara Ó.
  • 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 a misinterpretation of printers' use of an inverted comma, , as a substitute for superscript c when printing with hand-set metal type. Compare: M'Lean, McLean, M‘Lean.

    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, a transliteration of rtl=yes, 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, where the letters n and i are separate morae, rather than shi·ni·chi.
  • in the Chinese Pinyin romanization, the apostrophe is used before a syllable starting with a vowel in a multiple-syllable word when the syllable does not start the word, unless the syllable immediately follows a hyphen or other dash. This is done to remove ambiguity that could arise, as in Xi'an, which consists of the two syllables xi ''an, compared to such words as xian.
Furthermore, an apostrophe may be used to indicate a glottal stop in transliterations. For example:
  • in the Arabic word, a common transliteration of rtl=yes al-qur'ān'', the apostrophe corresponds to the diacritic maddah over the, one of the letters in the Arabic alphabet. An by itself would indicate the long vowel, and the adds a glottal stop.
Rather than , 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 for rtl=yes, the apostrophe corresponds to the Arabic letter.
Finally, in "scientific" transliteration of Cyrillic script, the apostrophe usually represents the soft sign, though in "ordinary" transliteration it is usually omitted. For example,
  • "The Ob River, also Ob', is a major river in western Siberia."

    Non-standard English use

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

Superfluous apostrophes ("greengrocers' apostrophes")

Apostrophes used in a non-standard manner to form noun plurals are known as greengrocers' apostrophes or grocers' apostrophes or grocer's apostrophes. They are sometimes humorously called greengrocers apostrophe's, rogue apostrophes, or idiot's apostrophes. The practice, once common and acceptable, 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 to clarify pronunciation. Truss says this usage is no longer considered proper in formal writing.
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. 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.
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 and radio's. This often produces so-called "Dunglish" errors when carried over into English. Hyperforeignism has been formalised in some pseudo-anglicisms. For example, the French word pin's is used for collectible lapel pins. Similarly, there is an Andorran football club called italic=no and a Japanese dance group called Super Monkey's.

Omission

In the UK there is a tendency to drop apostrophes in many commonly used names such as St Annes, St Johns Lane, and so on.
UK supermarket chain Tesco omits the mark where standard practice would require it. Signs in Tesco advertise . In his book Troublesome Words, author Bill Bryson lambasts Tesco for this, stating that "the mistake is inexcusable, and those who make it are linguistic Neanderthals."
The United States Board on Geographic Names discourages the use of possessive apostrophes in geographic names, though state agencies do not always conform; Vermont's official state website provides information concerning Camel's Hump State Forest.
The Geographical Names Board of New South Wales, Australia, excludes possessive apostrophes from place names, along with other punctuation.

Particular cases

, a proponent of English spelling reform on phonetic principles, argued that the apostrophe was mostly redundant. He did not use it for spelling cant, hes, etc., in many of his writings. He did, however, allow I'm and it's. Hubert Selby Jr. used a slash instead of an apostrophe mark for contractions and did not use an apostrophe at all for possessives. Lewis Carroll made greater use of apostrophes, and frequently used sha'n't, with an apostrophe in place of the elided ll as well as the more usual o. These authors' usages have not become widespread.
The British pop group Hear'Say famously made unconventional use of an apostrophe in its name. Truss comments that "the naming of Hear'Say in 2001 was ... a significant milestone on the road to punctuation anarchy".

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. The author and language commentator Anu Garg 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". 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. In a letter to the English Journal, Peter Brodie stated that apostrophes are "largely decorative... rarely clarify meaning". John C. Wells, emeritus professor of phonetics at University College London, says the apostrophe is "a waste of time". The Apostrophe Protection Society, founded by retired journalist John Richards in 2001, closed in 2019, after a period of 18 years of campaigning for its preservation and correct usage. Closing the association, Richards, then aged 96, said that "We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won!".
In a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, Geoffrey Pullum proposed that the apostrophe be considered the 27th letter of the alphabet, arguing that it is not a form of punctuation.

Non-English use

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, m'i mori. It is used too in some of the forms of possessive pronouns, for example: s'ëmës.
  • In Afrikaans, as in Dutch, 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'. As the initial e is omitted and cannot be capitalised, the second word in a sentence that begins with 'n is capitalised instead. 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.
  • In Catalan, French, Italian, Ligurian, and Occitan word sequences such as coup d'état, Maître d'hôtel, L'Aquila, Alpe d'Huez and L'Hospitalet de Llobregat the final vowel in the first word is elided because the word that follows it starts with a vowel or a mute h. French elision similarly occurs with qu'il instead of que il, c'est instead of ce est, 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 such elision anymore, but change to the masculine form instead: ma preceding église becomes mon église.
  • * 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.
  • In Danish, apostrophes are sometimes seen on commercial materials. One might commonly see Ta' mig med 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.
  • In Dutch, as in Afrikaans, 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 as genitivus temporalis in 's morgens, 's middags, 's avonds, 's nachts and in some frozen place names such as 's-Hertogenbosch, s-Gravenhage, s-Gravenbrakel, s-Hertogenrade, etc. 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 italic=no limits the elision mark to the definite article l' and singular nominative nouns. This is mostly confined to poetry and songs. Idiomatic phrases such as dank' al and del' are nonetheless frequent. In-word elision is usually marked with a hyphen, as in D-ro. 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'; but in the latter case, modern usage is to use either a hyphen or a middle dot when disambiguation is necessary, as in ĉas-hundo or ĉas·hundo, "a hunting dog", not to be mispronounced as ĉa.ŝun.do.
  • In Finnish, the apostrophe is used in inflected forms of words whose basic form has a "k" between similar vowels, to show that the "k" has elided in the inflected form: for example the word raaka becomes raa'at in the plural. The apostrophe shows that the identical vowels on either side of it belong to different syllables.
  • The Galician language standard admits the use of the apostrophe for contractions that normally do not use it, when the second element begins a proper noun, generally a title: o argumento d'A Esmorga. They are also used to reproduce oral elisions and, as stated below, to join commercial names of popular public establishments such as restaurants.
  • 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 becomes w; in y'ani?, ye becomes y. But the final vowel of a polysyllable is always written, even if it is elided in speech: omusajja oyo, not *omusajj'oyo, because omusajja is a polysyllable.
  • 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 English/Saxon style of using an apostrophe for possession was introduced after the spelling reform, but is strongly disagreed on by native speakers, and discouraged. Although possessive usage is widespread, it is often deemed incorrect. The German equivalent of "greengrocers' apostrophes" would be the derogatory Deppenapostroph.
  • 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 for δὲ ἄλλος and ἆροὐ for ἆρα οὐ. 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 abbreviations. A double geresh, known by the dual form gershayim, is used to denote acronyms or initialisms; it is inserted before the last letter of the acronym. Examples: פרופ׳ ; נ״ב. 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.
  • In Irish, the past tense of verbs beginning with a vowel, or with fh followed by a vowel, begins with d' , for example do oscail becomes d'oscail and do fhill becomes d'fhill. The copula is is often elided to 's, and do, mo etc. are elided before f and vowels.
  • In Italian it is used for elision with pronouns, as in l'ha instead of la ha; with articles, as in l'opera instead of la opera; and for truncation, as in po' instead of poco. Stylistically, sentences beginning with È are often rendered as E' in newspapers, to minimise leading.
  • In modern Norwegian, the apostrophe marks that a word has been contracted, such as ha'kke from har ikke. 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. As Norwegian does not 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 and manns, without apostrophe, but los and los'. Indicating the possessive for the two former American presidents named George Bush, whose names end in, could be written as both Bushs and Bush'.
  • In Portuguese the apostrophe is used to reproduce certain popular pronunciations such as s'enxerga or in a few combinations of word, when there is the suppression of the vowel of the preposition de in certain compound words such as caixa-d'água, galinha-d'angola, pau-d'alho, estrela-d'alva, etc. The apostrophe is most commonly not used in the word pra, the reduced or popular form of the preposition para, but some advocate for its used in preposition + article contractions: para + a = p'ra/pra, para + o = p'ro/pro, etc..
  • In modern Spanish the apostrophe is no longer used to indicate elision in standard writing, though it can sometimes be found in older poetry for that purpose. Instead Spanish writes out the words in full, for example de enero and mi hijo, and the elisions are supplied by the speaker..
  • In Swedish, the apostrophe marks an elision, such as på sta'n, short for på staden, 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.
  • Welsh uses the apostrophe to mark elision of the definite article yr following a vowel, 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:
The apostrophe represents sounds resembling the glottal stop in the Turkic languages and in some romanizations of Semitic languages, including Arabic and Hebrew. In that case, the letter 'ayn 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" vowel 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 a word. It therefore marks a morpheme boundary before and, in Belarusian, is a letter of the alphabet rather than a simple punctuation mark in English, as it is not a punctuation mark in Belarusian. It appears frequently in Ukrainian, as, for instance, in the words: 'five', 'departure', 'united', 'to clear up, explain', play, etc.
  • In Russian and some derived alphabets, the same function has been served by the hard sign. 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.
  • In some Latin transliterations of certain Cyrillic alphabets, the apostrophe is used to replace the soft sign, e.g., Русь is transliterated Rus' according to the BGN/PCGN system. Some of these transliteration schemes use a double apostrophe to represent the apostrophe in Ukrainian and Belarusian text and the hard sign in Russian text, e.g. Ukrainian слов'янське is transliterated as .
  • Some Karelian orthographies use an apostrophe to indicate palatalization, e.g. n'evvuo, d'uuri, el'vüttiä.
  • In Võro an apostrophe is often used as a simplification to replace the regular Võro palatalization mark which is the accute accent, for example as'aq replacing regular form aśaq.

    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.
  • 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 or niveau 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.
  • In Estonian, apostrophes can be used in the declension of some foreign names to separate the stem from any declension endings; e.g., Monet or Monet'sse of Monet.
  • 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, Bordeaux'hon. 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 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 spelled 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.
  • In Turkish, proper nouns are capitalised and an apostrophe is inserted between the noun and any following inflectional suffix, e.g. İstanbul'da, contrasting with okulda and İstanbullu.
  • In Welsh the apostrophe is used with infixed pronouns in order to distinguish them from the preceding word.

    Miscellaneous uses in other languages

  • In Breton, the combination cʼh is used for the consonant , while ch is used for the consonant .
  • 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, the word form čet' is used. Čet is the informal variant of the verb form četl, at least in some varieties. 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 below 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. This hiatus has to be indicated in spelling with an apostrophe if a long vowel or the final vowel of a diphthong would be immediately followed by the same vowel, e.g. ruoko → ruo'on, vaaka → vaa'an. Similarly, the apostrophe is used to mark the hiatus that occurs in poetry, e.g. miss' on for missä on.
  • Galician restaurants sometimes use ' in their names following the standard article O.
  • In Ganda, ng is used in place of ŋ on keyboards where this character is not available. The apostrophe distinguishes it from the letter combination ng, which has separate use in the language. Compare this with the Swahili usage below.
  • In Hebrew, the geresh 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 , , and are indicated using ג, ת, and צ with a geresh. For example, the name George is spelled ג׳ורג׳ in Hebrew.
  • *To denote a Hebrew numeral
  • *To denote a Hebrew letter which stands for itself
  • *Gershayim to denote a Hebrew letter name
  • *Another use of geresh is to denote the last syllable in some words of Yiddish origin.
  • *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. This may be done after an initial E or an accented final vowel, or when the proper form of the letter is unavailable for technical reasons. So a sentence beginning È vero che... may be written as E' vero che.... This form is often seen in newspapers, as it is the only case of an accent [|above] the cap height and its omission permits the text to be more closely spaced. Less commonly, a forename like 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, s's, n'n, th'th, and ch'ch .
  • In Lithuanian, the apostrophe is occasionally used to add a Lithuanized ending on an international word, e.g.- "parking'as", "Skype'as", "Facebook'as".
  • In standard Lojban orthography, the apostrophe is a letter in its own right that can appear only between two vowels, and is phonemically realised as either or, more rarely,.
  • 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, or hor for hore ); however, these elisions are restricted to poetry. Moreover, the apostrophe is also used before a two-digit year number : '.
  • In Swahili, an apostrophe after ng shows that there is no sound of after the 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 in all four national languages.
  • In the new [Uzbek alphabet|Uzbek Latin alphabet] adopted in 2000, the apostrophe serves as a diacritical mark to distinguish different phonemes written with the same letter: it differentiates oʻ from o, and gʻ 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 ʼayn, replacing Cyrillic ъ.
  • In English Yorkshire dialect, the apostrophe is used to represent the word the, which is contracted to a more glottal /t/ sound. Most users will write in t'barn, on t'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 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 '. 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. This is a kind of morpheme-separation marking.
  • In the largely superseded Wade–Giles romanization for Standard Chinese, an apostrophe marks aspiration of the preceding consonant sound. Example: in tsê the consonant represented by ts is unaspirated, but in ts'ê the consonant represented by ts is aspirated. Some academic users of the system write this character as a spiritus asper or single left quotation mark.
  • In some systems of romanization for the Japanese, the apostrophe is used between moras in ambiguous situations, to differentiate between, for example, ' and ' + .
  • In science fiction and fantasy, the apostrophe is often used in fictional names, sometimes to indicate a glottal stop, but also sometimes simply for decoration.

    Typographic form

The shape of the apostrophe originated in manuscript writing, as a point with a downwards tail curving clockwise. This is the form of the modern punctuation apostrophe, and of the right single quotation mark. Later sans-serif typefaces had stylised apostrophes with a more geometric or simplified form, but usually retaining the same directional bias as a closing quotation mark.
With the invention of the typewriter, a "neutral" or "straight" shape quotation mark, , was created to represent a number of different glyphs with a single keystroke: the apostrophe, both the opening and the closing single quotation marks, the single primes, and on some typewriters even the exclamation point. This is known as the typewriter apostrophe or vertical apostrophe. The same convention was adopted for double quotation marks. Both simplifications carried over to computer keyboards and the ASCII character set.

Informal use in measurement and mathematics

Formally, the symbol used to represent a foot of length, depth, or height, is and that for the inch is .. Similarly, the prime symbol is the formal representation of a minute of arc, and double prime represents a second of arc. Similarly in mathematics, the prime is generally used to generate more variable names for similar things without resorting to subscripts, with generally meaning something related to .
Because of the very close similarity of the typewriter apostrophe and typewriter double quote to prime and double prime, substitution in informal contexts is ubiquitous, but using the typewriter characters is deprecated in contexts where proper typography is important. Using the typewriter characters also risks having an automatic process "correct" them into punctuation-style apostrophes and quotation marks, which are less similar to the intended symbols.

Unicode

In its Unicode Standard, the Unicode Consortium describes three characters that represent apostrophe:
  • : The typewriter or ASCII apostrophe. The standard remarks:
  • is preferred where the character is to represent a punctuation mark, as for contractions: "we’ve", and the code is also referred to as a punctuation apostrophe. The closing single quote and the apostrophe were unified in Unicode 2.1 "to correct problems in the mapping tables from Windows and Macintosh code pages." This can make searching text more difficult as quotes and apostrophes cannot be distinguished without context.
  • is preferred where the apostrophe is to represent a modifier letter. In the latter case, it is also referred to as a letter apostrophe. The letter apostrophe may be used, for example, in transliterations to represent the Arabic glottal stop or the Cyrillic "soft sign", or in some orthographies such as cʼh of Breton, where this combination is an independent trigraph. ICANN considers this the proper character for Ukrainian apostrophe within IDNs. This character is rendered identically to in the Unicode code charts, and the standard cautions that one should never assume this code is used in any language.

    Characters similar to apostrophe

  • Hawaiian okina and for the transliteration of Arabic and Hebrew ʻayn.
  • Arabic hamza and Hebrew alef.
  • Arabic and Hebrew ʿayin.
  • Stress accent or dynamic accent.
  • One of two characters for glottal stop in Nenets.
  • Also known as combining Greek psili.
  • Also known as combining Greek dasia.
  • Identical to U+0313.
  • Also known as Greek .
  • Saltillo of the languages of Mexico.
  • Fullwidth form of the typewriter apostrophe.

    Computing

In modern computing practice, Unicode is the standard and default method for character encoding. However, Unicode itself and many legacy applications have echoes of earlier practices. Furthermore, the limited character set provided by computer keyboards has also required practical and pragmatic adjustments. These issues are detailed below.

ASCII encoding

The typewriter apostrophe,, was inherited by computer keyboards, and is the only apostrophe character available in the ASCII character encoding, at code value 0x27. In ASCII, it may be used to represent any of left single quotation mark, right single quotation mark, apostrophe, vertical line or prime, or an acute accent. In Unicode, which is a superset of ASCII, it is encoded as.
Many earlier computer displays and printers rendered the ASCII apostrophe as a punctuation apostrophe, and rendered the backtick as a matching left single quotation mark. This allowed a more "typeset" appearance of text: ``I can't'' would appear as 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.

Punctuation apostrophe in 8-bit encodings

Support for the punctuation apostrophe was introduced in several 8-bit character encodings, such as the original Mac OS|Apple Macintosh] operating system's Mac Roman character set, 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 contains the punctuation 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. Some earlier non-Microsoft browsers would display a '?' for this and make web pages composed with Microsoft software somewhat hard to read.
In Unicode, this apostrophe is encoded as.

Entering apostrophes

Although ubiquitous in typeset material, the punctuation apostrophe is rather difficult to enter on a computer, since it does not have its own key on most types of consumer keyboard. Outside the world of professional typesetting and graphic design, most people use the typewriter apostrophe. Because typewriter apostrophes are now often automatically converted to punctuation apostrophes by word processing and similar software, the punctuation apostrophe routinely appears in documents produced by non-professionals.
XML defines an ' character entity reference for the ASCII typewriter apostrophe. This entity reference is officially supported in HTML since HTML 5.

Smart quotes

To make punctuation apostrophes easier to enter, word processing and publishing software often convert typewriter apostrophes to punctuation apostrophes during text entry. 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 correct. Smart quotes features often incorrectly convert a leading apostrophe to an opening quotation mark. 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° 08″ as 49° 53’ 08”.
In Microsoft Word it is possible to turn smart quotes off. Alternatively, typing Control-Z 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 punctuation apostrophe.

Programming

Some programming languages, like Pascal, use the ASCII apostrophe to delimit string literals. 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, e.g. foo='He said "Bar!"';. Strings delimited with apostrophes are often called single quoted. Some languages, such as Perl, PHP, and many shell languages, treat single quoted strings as "raw" strings, while double quoted strings have expressions replaced with their values when interpreted.
The C programming language |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 can be included as optional digit separators in numeric literals.
In Visual Basic an apostrophe is used to denote the start of a comment.
In the Lisp family of programming languages, an apostrophe is shorthand for the quote operator.
In Rust, in addition to being used to delimit a character literal, an apostrophe can start an explicit lifetime.