Possession for words ending in “s” | The Apostrophe | Punctuation | Khan Academy

Hello Garans, hello Paige, hi David. So, we're talking about possession for names or words ending in the letter S. So, there's some confusion, I think, about what to do if you've got to make someone's name possessive if their name ends in an S. Like, for example, my friend Jess.

If we're talking about Jess and we're talking about something that belongs to her, like Jess's hat, we know that there should be an apostrophe in there. But should there also be an S? The answer is yes. There had been some debate over this for some time. But now, let me tell you, the answer is yes: Jess's hat. Right? It seems like a lot of S's in a row, but it's important for understanding what someone's trying to say.

Mhm. So, the same thing happens, um, regardless. It can be for words ending in S, like bus. So if we said, you know, the air conditioning on this bus is broken, we could say instead, to make that a little bit shorter, the bus's air conditioning is broken. Right? And so we're, again, we're just taking all of that information about the air conditioning that belongs to the bus. All of that is just sort of being bundled up into this apostrophe S.

And it doesn't matter that bus already ends with an S. We're just, this works the same as any other word. We're just going to say bus's. If we wanted to talk about the chili culture of the State of Texas, for example, we would say Texas's chili culture. Yeah, so it's exactly the same as any other singular word. Even though it ends in S, you still need another S. So just add an apostrophe S.

And if you didn't know, now you know. And that's how to form the possessive for names or words ending in S. You can learn anything. David out. Paige out.