The Apostrophe (mark) reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Jul-2004
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Apostrophe (mark)

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Punctuation marks
apostrophe ( ' )
parentheses ( ( ) ),
brackets ( [ ] ); ( { } ); ( < > )
colon ( : )
comma ( , )
dash ( ‒ ); ( – ); ( — ); ( ― )
ellipsis ( ... )
exclamation mark ( ! ); ( ¡ ! )
full stop/period ( . )
hyphen ( - ); ( ‐ )
interrobang ( ‽ )
question mark ( ? ); ( ¿ ? )
quotation marks ( ‘ ’ ); ( “ ” );
    ( ‹ › ); ( « » ); ( ‚ ‘ ); ( „ “ );
    ( „ ” ); ( 「 」 ); ( 『 』 )
semicolon ( ; )
slash ( / ) and backslash ( \\ )
space (   ) and interpunct ( · )
vertical bar / pipe ( | )
asterisk ( * ) and dagger ( † ‡ )

An apostrophe ( ' or ’ ) is a punctuation and sometimes diacritic mark in languages written in the Latin alphabet. In English, it marks omissions, forms the possessive, and, in special cases, forms plurals.

Table of contents
1 English language usage
2 Alternative meanings
3 Computers and Unicode
4 External links

English language usage

Things to note

Tip

To check you've got it right, swap the sentence around so that the part before the apostrophe becomes the last word. If the sense hasn't changed, you've got it right.

Pens' lids becomes lids of the pens.
Boy's hats becomes hats of the boy.
Boys' hats becomes hats of the boys.
Children's hats becomes hats of the children.
Two weeks' notice becomes notice of two weeks.
One week's notice becomes notice of one week.

But childrens' hats becomes hats of the childrens, so must be wrong.

Greengrocers' apostrophes

Wrongly placed apostrophes are known as Greengrocers' apostrophes (or sometimes, humorously, as Greengrocers apostrophe's), due to the frequent occurrence of hand-written signs on their produce, offering potatoe's, cabbage's and such like.

Derivation

The use of the apostrophe to note possession in the English language derived from the Genitive case, but is now considered a Clitic.



Alternative meanings


Computers and Unicode

In computer programming, the "normal" apostrophe (') (apostrophe or apostrophe-quote) corresponds to Unicode and ASCII character 39, or U+0027.  The (preferred) apostrophe ’ (right single quotation mark or single comma quotation mark) corresponds to Unicode character U+2019.

The difference between the two is great: U+0027 can be used to represent many different characters, such as a punctuation mark, a left single quotation mark, an apostrophe, a prime, etc. U+2019 always represent an apostrophe, or a right single quotation mark.

From the Unicode 2.1 standard:


U+02BC modifier letter apostrophe is preferred where the character is to represent a modifier letter (for example, in transliterations to indicate a glottal stop). In the latter case, it is also referred to as a letter apostrophe.

U+2019 right single quotation mark is preferred where the character is to represent a punctuation mark, as in "We’ve been here before." In the latter case, U+2019 is also referred to as a punctuation apostrophe. [1]


An apostrophe for punctuation should be drawn with a light curl (resembling an upsidedown comma), but U+0027 is nearly always drawn as a straight vertical line, and Unicode actually defines it must be drawn as such. U+2019 has the correct curl.

However, most digital documents use the "normal" apostrophe everywhere. The main reason for this is that on the character ' can be easily typed with any keyboard, whereas typing ’ typically requires a special input method. The "normal" apostrophe is also preferred for compatibility reasons, because ’ is not in the same position (or even present) in all the many different 8-bit character encodings in use across the world, nor is it present in 7-bit ASCII.


External links