the.com/apostrophe
the tiny floating comma that decides whether you know your stuff or your friends do.
means A punctuation mark (') used to show possession or mark omitted letters in contractions, or in rhetoric, a sudden turn to address an absent person or thing.
from From Greek 'apostrophos,' meaning 'turning away,' from 'apo-' (away) and 'strephein' (to turn) — the same root that gives us 'catastrophe' (a down-turn) and 'strophe.' The omission sense fits beautifully: the mark stands where a letter has 'turned away' and vanished. It came into English in the 16th century by way of Latin and French.
- name origin
- Greek for turning away, as in omitting letters
- possessive duty
- didn't standardize until the 1700s
- its,it's
- trips up native speakers daily
- greengrocer's
- misuse so common it earned a nickname
- under siege
- some towns banned them from street signs
the greengrocer's apostrophe — common error adding apostrophes to plurals (e.g., 'apple's' instead of 'apples'), named by british linguists in the 1990s
apostrophe in ancient greek — rhetorical device where speaker addresses absent person or object directly, used by homer and greek playwrights