The role of the apostrophe in a phrase like “the apostrophe’s role” was hotly debated for decades. Then people began using apostrophes to indicate the genitive (or possessive) role of a noun, confusing the public even further. To make things even more confusing, people refused to agree on exactly which letters should be replaced with an apostrophe often it was unvoiced single vowels, but occasionally it was larger pieces of a word, such as the re and as of fo’c’sle. Here's where things begin to get confusing: the apostrophe would be stuck into a word to indicate the removal of a letter (usually a vowel) which was not pronounced, such as the e in “walk’d.” But sometimes people would simply stick an apostrophe in the middle of a word for no discernible reason, as the 17th century poet Robert Herrick did when he wrote “What fate decreed, time now ha’s made us see.” It is widely accepted that the first apostrophes were marks of elision which indicated that something had been taken out of the word. The first grammatical apostrophes addressed absence in a different way. Before apostrophe referred to a squiggle on the page, it was a rhetorical term for an address to a usually absent person or a usually personified thing (the word comes from the Greek apostrophē, which literally means “the act of turning away”). The mark we call an apostrophe probably originated in 1509, in an Italian edition of Petrarch, or in 1529, at the hand of the French printer Geoffroy Tory, who is also credited with inventing the accent and the cedilla. In this theory, the apostrophe stands in for the missing 'e'. The 's' at the end of a word indicating possession ('The king's fashion sense') probably comes from the Old English custom of adding '-es' to singular genitive masculine nouns (in modern English, 'The kinges fashion sense').

What do apostrophes mean