About this video
Paige and David explain the one rare case where an apostrophe helps make a plural: plural lowercase letters, like "dot your i's". The apostrophe stops i's from looking like the word "is". Capital letters and abbreviations such as CDs, DVDs and MP3s just add a lowercase s with no apostrophe.
You'll be able to
- explain why lowercase letters use an apostrophe to form a plural.
- form plurals like CDs and MP3s without an apostrophe.
- decide whether a plural needs an apostrophe.
Key words
- plural
- A form showing more than one of something, usually made by adding s.
- apostrophe
- A punctuation mark (') that almost never makes plurals, except for lowercase letters.
- lowercase letter
- A small letter like a or i, as opposed to a capital letter like A or I.
Transcript
- [Paige] Hello Grammarians, Hello David.
- [David] Hello Paige. - [Paige] So today, we're gonna 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 when it does.
- [David] 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?
- [Paige] That one time is when you are pluralizing a lower case letter. 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 gonna put an apostrophe before the S.
- [David] OK, so that's to prevent it from looking like is, right, 'cause if we didn't have that apostrophe in there, it would just be the word is. There's no way to tell I's from the word is in that case.
- [Paige] Right, and you need to remember to always dot your is, doesn't make any sense.
- [David] Right. - [Paige] 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 a plural I and not is.
- [David] So this is the only case. If it were upper case letters, you wouldn't do this, right. If you were saying David's capital As look like trees. It's less likely that you're gonna gonna confuse capital A, lower case S in the middle of a sentence for the word as.
- [Paige] Right, 'cause you wouldn't just capitalize the word as in the middle of a sentence.
- [David] Right. So this is for only lower case letters, the little ones, the inside voice. (laughing) Paige, that's it, right? - [Paige] Yeah.
- [David] 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 CDs, or DVDs, or MP3s, or whatever you kids are listening to these days, it doesn't matter, there's no need for an apostrophe in any of these places.
- [Paige] Right, 'cause that's pretty clear.
- [David] You just use a lower case S, but if you're trying to talk about multiple lower case letters, then you use an apostrophe.
- [Paige] 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 lower case letter. You can learn anything.
- [David] David out. - [Paige] Paige out.
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