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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 ...
To make typographic apostrophes easier to enter, word processing and publishing software often convert typewriter apostrophes to typographic apostrophes during text entry (at the same time converting opening and closing single and double quotes to their standard left-handed or right-handed forms). A similar facility may be offered on web ...
A contraction is a shortened version of the spoken and written forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters and sounds.. In linguistic analysis, contractions should not be confused with crasis, abbreviations and initialisms (including acronyms), with which they share some semantic and phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by the term ...
Some acronyms are formed by contraction; these are covered at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Abbreviations. Some trademarks (e.g. Nabisco) and titles of published works (e.g. “Ain't That a Shame”) consist of or contain contractions; these are covered at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Trademarks and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Titles, respectively.
Contractions that do not contain an apostrophe almost always take a period in North American English, but not in British English when the contraction ends with the same letter as the full term: Doctor can be abbreviated Dr. in American and Canadian English, but is Dr in British English. If the dot-less usage could be confusing in the context ...
Poetic contractions are contractions of words found in poetry but not commonly used in everyday modern English. Also known as elision or syncope , these contractions are usually used to lower the number of syllables in a particular word in order to adhere to the meter of a composition. [ 1 ]
The apostrophes represent the sounds that are removed and are not spoken but help the reader to understand that it is a contraction and not a word of its own. These contractions used to be written out when transcribed (i.e. cannot , is not , I am ) even if they were pronounced as a contraction, but now they are always written as a contraction ...
Contractions are certainly not used in academic writing, and I would never use contractions in a formal letter. The form cannot should always be used, however; and the distinction between cannot (negating can, used when can't would have been used in spoken or less formal language) and can not (negating the following verb [most of the time ...