apostrophe

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for apostrophe is 10 letters long, classified as a noun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /əˈpɒs.tɹə.fi/. Corpus data places it at rank #38,728 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it. The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The text character ’, which serves as a punctuation mark in various languages and as a diacritical mark in certain rare contexts.".

Our generated misspelling index lists 15 likely wrong-spelling variants for apostrophe, with forms such as "aopstrophe", "aposrtophe", and "aposstrophe". Each variant is a distinct typo pattern an edit-distance generator flags, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: From French apostrophe, or Latin apostrophus, from Ancient Greek ἀπόστροφος (apóstrophos, “accent of elision”), a noun use of an adjective from ἀποστρέφω (apostréphō, “I turn away”), from ἀπό (apó, “away from”) + στρέφω (stréphō, “to turn”). Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is apostrophe, spelled A-P-O-S-T-R-O-P-H-E, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.