Advanced (plural) possession | The Apostrophe | Punctuation | Khan Academy

Hello Garans, hello David, hello Paige.

So today we're going to talk about plural possession, meaning when more than one person, or thing, or animal owns something else. This, like most other types of possession, tends to involve apostrophes.

Makes sense? Checks out? Yeah, cool. Um, so it's just apostrophe 's', right? I mean, why are we even making this video? Well, no, apostrophe 's' is a rule that applies when the possessive noun is singular.

So for example, the dog's bone, right? That's one dog's bone. One singular dog possessing one bone. Exactly. What if I wanted to talk about like five dogs' bones, like they had a bunch, like a big old pile of bones, right?

So that is a case where we will not use apostrophe 's'. What? I'm sorry to disappoint. I'm not disappointed, I'm just surprised. Not actually surprised, that's just a stage trick.

So if we're talking about five dogs and their bones, we say five dogs apostrophe bones, and there's no 's' after the apostrophe. So it goes 's' apostrophe. So we have the 's' for the plural, and then an apostrophe for possession, but not a second 's' for possession, right? We don't want like the dogs's bones.

Okay, okay. But the apostrophe at the end isn't about there being multiple bones, right? It's about there being multiple dogs.

Yeah, so even if it's multiple dogs and they're possessing a singular thing. Um, so five dogs all had the same favorite dog park, right? 'Cause it's the best dog park, okay, in the world.

Okay, so in that case, you would say something like the dogs' favorite park, right? Park is still singular, but dogs is plural, so that's why it's just apostrophe and no 's' afterwards.

So this also only applies to plural nouns that end in 's', right? So if I'm talking about one of our irregular plural nouns, like, uh, mice, or geese, or men, or women, I would still add apostrophe 's', right?

Like okay, so I'm imagining a department store, and there's a men's section, a women's section, and a mice's section.

Okay, that is an interesting department store. Well, it doesn't take up that much floor space for the mouse section, so I get that. If there's more than one dog, it's dogs' apostrophe.

Uh, if it's a plural irregular noun that doesn't end in 's', then it's still just apostrophe 's' like regular possession.

What about family names?

O, okay, that's a good question. So let's say there's a family with the last name Harper, okay? And I am going to visit the Harper's house.

Okay, right? So that's the house that belongs to all of the Harpers, the Harper family. Okay, so that seems pretty straightforward. But what if we're talking about a name that ends in 's', like Burns?

Oh, okay, yeah, that can make things a little bit complicated. The way that names that end in 's' become plural is by adding 'e s' to the end of them, so Burns becomes Burnses.

And so Burnses, without the apostrophe, is how I would refer to that family unit in total also, right? Like it's Mr. Burns and the Burnses or Dr. Jones and the Joneses.

Exactly.

Okay, so then when you want to make that possessive, as in the Burns's house, you make it plural by adding that 'es' and then put the apostrophe after that.

Cool. So plural things that end in 's' don't have a second 's' after the apostrophe?

Yeah, but irregular plurals like men, women, mice do.

Yeah, thank you, Paige.

You're welcome.

You can learn anything. David out. Paige out.