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Making words plural using apostrophes

Most words become plural just by adding an ‘s’ to the end of the word:

‘Dog’ becomes ‘dogs’

‘House’ becomes ‘houses’

Sometimes ‘es’ is added instead of just ‘s’, and there are always some exceptions, like ‘die’ (singular) and ‘dice’ (plural).

People commonly use an apostrophe to write the plural form of single letters or numbers or abbreviations:

I counted how many e’s there were in the page and found that it was the most common letter.

It wasn’t that hard to get straight A’s, providing you were willing to work.

How many RDO’s have you had this week? (Rostered Days Off)

However, it is much more correct to write the plurals without the apostrophes in them, like this:

I counted how many es there were in the page and found that it was the most common letter.

It wasn’t that hard to get straight As, providing you were willing to work.

How many RDOs have you had this week? (Rostered Days Off)

Notice that when you leave out the apostrophe, the capital letter plurals are quite easy to read (As and RDOs). I personally don’t find ‘es’ as easy to read however.

Apostrophes are also used to form verb contractions, which is covered in that section.