Apostrophe

The apostrophe (' or ’) character is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets.

In English it is used for several purposes:

• The marking of the omission of one or more letters (as in the contraction) of do not to don't.
• The marking of possessive case of nouns (as in the eagle's feathers, or in one month's time).
• The marking of plurals of individual characters (e.g. p's and q's).

The apostrophe looks the same as a closing single quotation mark in many fonts, although they have different meanings, and Unicode recommends using the quotation mark character to represent most uses of the apostrophe.