Apostrophe
punctuation mark and diacritic mark
The apostrophe (’, ') is a punctuation mark and sometimes a diacritical mark in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other writing systems. 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 (as in "the eagle's feathers", "in one month's time", "the twins' coats")
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 ἡ ἀπόστροφος [προσῳδία] (hē apóstrophos [prosōidía], '[the accent of] turning away or elision'), through Latin and French.
Usage in English
Historical development
The apostrophe was first used by Pietro Bembo in his edition of De Aetna (1496). It was introduced into English in the 16th century in imitation of French practice.
French practice
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 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. Modern French orthography has restored the spelling une heure.
“Apostrophe” enters the record as punctuation mark and diacritic mark. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Apostrophe, punctuation and mark can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Apostrophe” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Apostrophe, punctuation and mark provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q436048. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1496 and 1529.
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This entry incorporates text from “Apostrophe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.