' ’ | |||||
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Apostrophe | |||||
U+0027 ' APOSTROPHE U+2019 ’ RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK | |||||
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The apostrophe (' or ’) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for three basic purposes:
It is also used in a few distinctive cases for the marking of plurals, e.g. "p's and q's" or Oakland A's.
It is also used informally to indicate the units of foot and minutes of arc, although in these uses, the prime symbol is generally preferred.
The word apostrophe comes from the Greek ἡ ἀπόστροφος [προσῳδία], through Latin and French.[1][2]
The English form apostrophe is due to its adoption via French and its current pronunciation as four syllables is due to a confusion with the rhetorical device apostrophé
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