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
Nat Geo Explorers discuss the importance of inclusive communities | Pride Month Roundtable | Nat Geo
All of the work we do is based and affected by our identities, right? Whether that is conservation or highlighting social stories, all of those cool ideas, we owe them to our differences and our diversity. It makes us stronger, and it makes us think outsi…
How I bought a Tesla for $78 Per Month
I just bought the $35,000 Tesla Model 3, and just like any 28-year-old millennial adieu, I ordered it online without ever having seen it and without ever having driven one before. Here’s what happened: I was browsing YouTube and happened to come across a…
Snow DNA Reveals New Way to Track Animals in Winter | Short Film Showcase
I’ve learned to appreciate the quiet in the cold. It’s just not something you did in any other place and in any other season. We’re the loudest things out there, thinking about rare species. They’re such an important part of the landscape and something th…
Zeros of polynomials: plotting zeros | Polynomial graphs | Algebra 2 | Khan Academy
We’re told we want to find the zeros of this polynomial, and they give us the polynomial right over here, and it’s in factored form. They say plot all the zeros or the x-intercepts of the polynomial in the interactive graph. This is a screenshot from Khan…
The Hessian matrix | Multivariable calculus | Khan Academy
Hey guys, so before talking about the vector form for the quadratic approximation of multivariable functions, I’ve got to introduce this thing called the Hessen Matrix. The Hessen Matrix, and essentially what this is, it’s just a way to package all the in…
Khan for Educators: Creating a class
Hi, I’m Megan, and in this video, we’ll walk through setting up a class on Khan Academy. First, log in to Khan Academy. Once you’re logged in, you should land on the teacher dashboard. The teacher dashboard is the starting point for most teacher-focused …