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The apostrophe (’, ') is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for two basic purposes:
The marking of the omission of one or more letters, e.g., the contraction of "do not" to "don't"
The marking of possessive case of nouns (as in "the eagle's feathers", "in one month's time", "the twins' coats")
It is also used in a few exceptional cases for the marking of plurals, e.g., "p's and q's" or Oakland A's. The same mark is used as a single quotation mark. It is also substituted informally for other marks – for example instead of the prime symbol to indicate the units of foot or minutes of arc.
The word apostrophe comes from the Greek ἡ ἀπόστροφος [προσῳδία] (hē apóstrophos [prosōidía], '[the accent of] turning away or elision'), through Latin and French.
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