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For most singular nouns, you add an apostrophe and “s” to make it possessive or to show ownership. For example, “The cat’s litter box.” Most plural nouns only need an apostrophe, such as ...
The plural genitive did not use the "-es" inflection, [9] and since many plural forms already consisted of the "-s" or "-es" ending, using the apostrophe in place of the elisioned "e" could lead to singular and plural possessives of a given word having the exact same spelling.
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 / ɪ z / when following a sibilant sound (/ s /, / z /, / ʃ /, / ʒ /, / tʃ / or / dʒ /), as / s / when following ...
Possession may be marked in many ways, such as simple juxtaposition of nouns, possessive case, possessed case, construct state (as in Arabic and Nêlêmwa), [3] or adpositions (possessive suffixes, possessive adjectives). For example, English uses a possessive clitic, 's; a preposition, of; and adjectives, my, your, his, her, etc.
Timothy Pulju, a senior lecturer in linguistics at Dartmouth College, said that until the 17th or 18th century, the possessive of proper names ending in S — such as Jesus or Moses — often was simply the name itself with no apostrophe or additional S. Eventually, the apostrophe was added (Jesus' or Moses') to denote possession, though the ...
There can be confusion over a plural possessive form. If the singular is "book's title" and the plural "books' titles", the latter can appear as "book's", or even "books's". The plural can be written with an erroneous apostrophe ("grocer's apostrophe" in Britain): "apple's and pear's".
Some authors who classify both sets of words as "possessive pronouns" or "genitive pronouns" apply the terms dependent/independent [7] or weak/strong [8] to refer, respectively, to my, your, etc., and mine, yours, etc. For example, under that scheme, my is termed a dependent possessive pronoun and mine an independent possessive pronoun.
Use straight apostrophes ('), not curly apostrophes (’). [ g ] Do not use accent marks or backticks ( ` ) as apostrophes. Templates such as {{ ' }} and {{ 's }} are helpful when an apostrophe (or single quote) appears at the beginning or end of text in italics or bold, because italics and bold are themselves indicated by sequences of single ...