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The apostrophe

The apostrophe

Apostrophes have several uses. The most common use is to make words possessive. You can use an apostrophe to change an awkwardly worded sentence into one that sounds a lot more fluent:

The tractor that Bob owns is red.

We can make the word ‘Bob’ possessive by adding an apostrophe and an ‘s’ after it and rewriting the sentence:

Bob’s tractor is red.

There are all sorts of rules for how to make words possessive, which are covered in the section on possessive nouns.