apostrophe.

1. A punctuation mark used in English to mark omitted letters, possessive constructions, and certain other conventional forms.

2. A rhetorical address to someone absent, to the dead, or to an abstract or personified thing.

Use it for

Words that belong together

• a possessive apostrophe
• an apostrophe in a contraction

On the page

She corrected the possessive apostrophe without changing the note’s angry phrasing.

The apostrophe in it’s marked omitted letters, not ownership.

Usage notes

Primary category: literary. Forms: Singular apostrophe; plural apostrophes. Legacy lexical fields mirror sense 1 only. Use numbered sense fields for all meanings.