yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Apostrophes and plurals | The Apostrophe | Punctuation | Khan Academy


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Hello grammarians! Hello David! Hello Paige!

So today we're going to talk about apostrophes and plurals. We talked about this a little bit in our introduction to the apostrophe video. This is a very, very rare case where we use an apostrophe to show that something is plural, and it almost never happens, but we will explain what it does.

Paige, when is the one time in this immense and wonderful galaxy of English when the stars align for it to be permissible to pluralize something with an apostrophe? That one time is when you are pluralizing a lowercase letter. So, if you're saying something like, "You need to remember to always dot your i's," where you're talking about the letter 'i' and there are several of them, you're going to put an apostrophe before the 's.' Okay? And that's to prevent it from looking like "is." Right? Because if we didn't have that apostrophe in there, it would just look like the word "is." There's no way to tell "i's" from the word "is" in that case, right? And you need to remember to always "dye" your "i's." That doesn't make any sense, right?

So, right. This apostrophe can look like it's making the letter 'i' possessive, but it's really just there to make it clear that this is the plural 'i' and not "'is." So this is the only case. If it were uppercase letters, you wouldn't do this, right? So if you were saying, you know, "David's capital A's look like trees," it's less likely that you're going to confuse capital 'A' and lowercase 's' in the middle of a sentence for the word "as," right? Because you wouldn't just capitalize the word "as" in the middle of a sentence, right?

So this is for only lowercase letters. So the little ones, the inside voice. I mean, but that's like Paige. That's it, right? Like that's the only exception. That's the only time you use apostrophes to form the plural. No other time.

So, if you're talking about—doesn't matter if you're talking about like CDs or DVDs or MP3s or whatever you kids are listening to these days—like it doesn't matter. There's no need for an apostrophe in any of these places, right? Because that was pretty clear. You just use a lowercase 's.' But if you're trying to talk about multiple lowercase letters, then you use an apostrophe.

Yeah! So if you're trying to figure out how to make something plural and you're like, "Do I use an apostrophe?" No! Unless it's a lowercase letter. You can learn anything.

David out. Paige out.

More Articles

View All
Joe Rogan brutally rejects Kamala Harris’s list of demands to appear on his podcast
The world’s biggest podcast host, Joe Rogan, has exposed a list of Kamala Harris’s demands in order to appear on his show. Following the hugely successful podcast interview between Joe Rogan and Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump, which was view…
Safari Live - Day 69 | Nat Geo WILD
Well hidden at the moment, tucked away in the long grass, and you can see that one of the little cubs is suckling away. So, these are the four cubs that we saw playing with the game drive blanket not all that long ago, tugging it backwards and forwards an…
Partial sums: term value from partial sum | Series | AP Calculus BC | Khan Academy
We’re told that the nth partial sum of the series from N equals one to infinity of a sub n is given by, and so the sum of the first n terms is N squared plus 1 over n plus 1. They want us to figure out what is the actual seventh term. And like always, pau…
How much I made from 10 Million Views in 30 Days
What’s up you guys, it’s Graham here! So let’s just get right into it. A few months ago, I made a video about how much I made from a 1 million view viral video, which I’ll just tell you so I’m not clickbaiting anyone. I made seventy-three hundred dollars …
See How Chainsaw Art Keeps This Guy Out of Trouble | Short Film Showcase
[Applause] There’s a lot of people out there that call themselves artists, but there’s no bad art. The beauty’s in the eye of the beholder. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Chainsaw carving has a certain element of theater to it; it’s kind of…
Calculating atomic weight | Chemistry | Khan Academy
We have listed here. We know that carbon-12 is the most common isotope of carbon on Earth. 98.89% of the carbon on Earth is carbon-12, and we know that by definition its mass is exactly 12 atomic mass units. Now, that’s not the only isotope of carbon on …