ἀπόστροφος

The Greek word apostrophos meant "turning away" — from apo (away) and strephein (to turn). In ancient Greek texts, the apostrophe marked elision: when a vowel was dropped before another vowel, a small curved mark turned the reader's attention away from the missing sound. It was a mark of absence, a sign that something had been deliberately removed.

Renaissance printers revived the mark in the 1500s for exactly the same purpose. French and English used it to show dropped letters: "l'homme" for "le homme," "o'er" for "over," "'tis" for "it is." The apostrophe was a clean, elegant solution — a tiny curve that said "a letter was here and is gone."

The possessive apostrophe arrived later and by accident. In Old English, possession was marked with an inflectional -es ending: "the kinges horse." As the language simplified, the E dropped out, leaving "the kings horse." Printers in the 1600s, interpreting the missing E as elision, inserted an apostrophe: "the king's horse." The possessive apostrophe was born from a misunderstanding — it marks a letter that was never really missing in the first place.

By the 1700s, grammarians had codified the possessive apostrophe as a rule. But the rule has never been stable. The greengrocer's apostrophe ("apple's for sale"), the its/it's confusion, and the question of "James' or James's" have generated more anxious correspondence to style guides than almost any other punctuation issue. A mark designed for clarity has become English's most reliable source of confusion.