There was formerly a respectable tradition (17th to 19th centuries) of using the apostrophe for noun plurals, especially in loanwords ending in a vowel (as in. An apostrophe followed by "s" was often used to mark a plural specifically, the Oxford Companion to the English Language notes that English spelling retained many inflections that were not pronounced as syllables, notably verb endings ("-est", "-eth", "-es", "-ed") and the noun ending "-es", which marked either plurals or possessives, also known as genitives (see Possessive apostrophe, below). Early English practice įrom the 16th century, following French practice, the apostrophe was used when a vowel letter was omitted either because of incidental elision ("I'm" for "I am") or because the letter no longer represented a sound ("lov'd" for "loved"). Modern French orthography has restored the spelling une heure. It was also frequently used in place of a final "e" (which was still pronounced at the time) when it was elided before a vowel, as in un' heure. Introduced by Geoffroy Tory (1529), the apostrophe was used in place of a vowel letter to indicate elision (as in l'heure in place of la heure). It was introduced into English in the 16th century in imitation of French practice. The apostrophe was first used by Pietro Bembo in his edition of De Aetna (1496). The word "apostrophe" comes ultimately from Greek ἡ ἀπόστροφος ( hē apóstrophos, ' turning away or elision'), through Latin and French. It is also used in a few distinctive cases for the marking of plurals, e.g.
The marking of the omission of one or more letters, e.g.In English, the apostrophe is used for two basic purposes:
The apostrophe ( ' or ’) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets.
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