Apostrophes and plurals | The Apostrophe | Punctuation | Khan Academy

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.