Apostrophes and plurals | The Apostrophe | Punctuation | Khan Academy Video Lecture | Complete Course on English Grammar: Upgrade your Speaking & Listening - Personal Skills

hello grammarians hello David hello
Paige so today we're going to talk about
apostrophes and plurals and 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 to be permissible to
plural by 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 we didn't have
that apostrophe in there
it would just like be the word is
there's no way to tell eyes from the
word is in that case right and you need
to remember to always Dyer is doesn't
make any sense right so right so 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
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 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 it I mean but that's like
page 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
listening to these days like it doesn't
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 page out