By Ellen Jovin
One thing I enjoy about the holiday season is the flood of opportunities, courtesy of holiday correspondence, to consider one of my favorite grammar topics: plurals and possessives of proper nouns. Such opportunities reach peak grammar geek in December, but fortunately abound all year round in email, invitations, signs, and more.
Is that building really the Smith’s new house? No, it is not. It is the Smiths’ new house. And it could never be the Smith’s house. If you are going for the singular (one person whose last name is Smith), it would simply be “Smith’s house.”
If you want to discuss an actual blacksmith’s house, which isn’t really a thing on the Upper West Side in the year 2025, then you’d have to use a lowercase letter: “the smith’s house.”
Rules for plurals of proper nouns—in other words, names—are very much like rules for plain old common nouns in English. If the name ends in an s sound, or z, or sh, you add es to make it plural. With ch it depends. If your family name is Bach pronounced like the composer, you are collectively the Bachs, but if your family happens to pronounce Bach like the word “batch,” you are the Baches.
People regularly try to make surnames plural by adding ’s. Don’t do that. These are both wrong: “I visited the Smith’s last night” and “Let’s go see the Jones’s.”
The situation calls for a summary:
- Singular possessive, Associated Press style (which is what you see in many newspapers): Tess’ dog ate my grammar homework.
- Singular possessive, most other stylebooks: Tess’s dog ate my grammar homework.
- Plural: I know three Tesses whose grammar homework was consumed by their dogs.
- Plural possessive: The three Tesses’ dogs are no longer allowed near grammar homework.
It’s weird that names cause such confusion, because they are handled almost exactly the same way common nouns are. In “My bosses are in Chicago at a grammar conference,” the plural of “boss” is “bosses,” which is formed according to the same pattern as the aforementioned triple Tess.
In “My bosses’ grammar conference has devolved into a fight over apostrophes mistakenly used to form plurals,” the plural possessive in “my bosses’ conference” works the same way as the plural possessive in “the three Tesses’ dogs.”
It’s choice that often causes confusion, though. People would probably be less bewildered if an s-free singular possessive weren’t freely circulating in many newspapers. While you can write either “Charles’ conjugations” or “Charles’s conjugations” and still enjoy the support of a large number of word professionals, common nouns are treated more consistently.
For example, it should be “My boss’s assistant has a large grammar library.” Add the s after the apostrophe and just keep moving. I personally prefer this approach for both common and proper nouns. If I am going to burn calories pronouncing that added possessive syllable, I want to represent it with an s in print. Unlike many users of English, I am untroubled by the sight of consecutive s’s.
Life in New York City is above-average confusing for possessive proper noun formers, though. Of the three highest-circulation papers in the city, only one leaves off the s, and that is the New York Post. The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times would both print “Charles’s conjugations” rather than “Charles’ conjugations.”
It is now time for a proper-noun grammar quiz. You can find the answers at the end.
- Alberta ran into the Roberts in Zabar’s. What is the surname of the family Alberta ran into?
- The number of syllables in the singular possessive of Charles minus the number of syllables in the plural of Charles equals .
- If Tom Hanks were cloned, there would be two Tom .
For a reality check on how easy it is to manage English names compared to some other languages, let’s take a quick look at Estonian. Estonian has 14 cases, and nouns change form based on how they are used in a sentence. If your name is Andres, it could end up as Andrese (possessive form), Andreselt (from Andres), Andresega (with Andres), Andreseta (without Andres), and more. That’s just for singulars!
Plural forms include Andreste, Andresteta, Andrestega, Andrestesse, and so on.
Phew, let’s flip back to English. Does it not feel as though we have suddenly switched from the highest gear on a bike to the lowest? You have the grammar equivalent of big strong quads and can easily handle a few simple name-form changes in English!
By coincidence (or is it?), this Friday is International Apostrophe Day. Please enjoy the grammar holiday, avoid using apostrophes to form plurals of surnames, and here are your quiz answers: 1. Robert, 2. zero, and 3. Tom Hankseses.
Just kidding! Hankses!
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Perhaps I should wait until Friday to ask this, but to forge right ahead: Ellen, would you agree that the proper Unicode character to represent the English apostrophe is U+02BC, the “MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE”? (Assuming it can be represented here, that would be “ʼ”.)
I’d love to provide a helpful answer here, but I have no freakin’ clue. Sorry, ecm. 😀 I don’t know. If you need me to go find out, I can.
Thanks, but thereʼs no need for you to go out of your way to investigate, except perhaps for insatiable curiosity. I just thought you might already have some position on the issue, which admittedly is not among the burning points of contention in punctuation/typography.
Iʼll come up with some better questions for you!
Yeah, that one’s been nagging at me for ages.
For me, Ted (https://tedclancy.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/which-unicode-character-should-represent-the-english-apostrophe-and-why-the-unicode-committee-is-very-wrong/) settled it.
Any thoughts on my so-called “punctuational collision” issue, as described in my comment to your first column here? A I described it then:
[…] specifically the em-dash–comma collision, which takes the form
Yadda yadda — yadda yadda —, yadda yadda.
A somewhat contrived example: “Eating the food — which was delicious —, I was reminded of home.”
This phenomenon occurs when, in the parenthetic use of em dashes, the final dash would “collide” with a comma marking off a clause or phrase, yielding an obviously incorrect “—,”. Solutions include replacing the dashes with parentheses (or in some cases commas) or entirely recasting the sentence, but these workarounds may result in a loss of punctuational nuance I’ve always found irritating. Perhaps I’m the only one bugged by this.
I doubt you are the only person bugged by it, ecm! I am familiar with this phenomenon and just drop the comma as long as doing so doesn’t seem to mess something up. But if it does, I just rewrite. There are numerous things like this in grammar and punctuation—we don’t always get everything we want out of every category of construction. 😀 It’s the burden we punctuators must carry with us through life.
In the end, practicality tends strongly to win out, doesnʼt it?
Do you know whether this specific phenomenon has a formal name? The last time I checked, I could find no cases of anyone elseʼs grumbling over it. Perhaps my fastidiousness over unpaired or improperly nested punctuation stems from my experience in software development, in which such defects can have major consequences.
I have been asked about this before, but rarely, and I don’t know a name for it. Practicality is important. (Though so is art!)
But what if it’s a silversmith shop? Wouldn’t you be visiting the Smith’s? Or a wordsmith? Are you visiting the Smith’s table?
Yes, but with a lower case S.
Joneses
The proper name is The New York Times. You should have italicized the word “the.”
I’m following Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition style on this (which I strongly prefer to the 18th edition on the same point).
All I can say is that it wasn’t a dog that ate my homework way back when (though it did go missing in something’s maw…). Now, if only Mrs. Teacher’s mind hadn’t been disinclined to believe me… 😉
Oh, how I love this column! My grammar is far from perfect; but it matters to me much more than is normal. Thank you so much! More, please!
💕💕
This is NYC in 2025. I was told that expecting people to speak English is considered racist. This article is something from a time capsule. I guess it’s to expected from people in the rich UWS bubble.
It’s not that anyone (other than a few rabid Republicans, of course) expects everyone to speak English but rather that if one writes in English, or indeed in any other language, one should be expected to write well. Do you take issue with competence, Peter?
As an occasional coach for English Language Learners (or students of English as a New Language, ENL, as the current terminology has it) I have great respect for the standards of practicality and clarity first, followed by increasing precision. Plurals and possessives matter! Students can always be applauded when their meaning is clear (even if the grammar is not “correct”) – because their primary need is to communicate. So the first goal is clarity sufficient to minimize confusion. Do we need every correct articles? Semi-colons? Not at this stage. Singular and plural matter. Basic verbs, person, and tense. But as they gain confidence, and write better, improved clarity and precision can be encouraged. (And yes, in these days of AI, we still urge students, even teaching remotely, to write homework out by hand, for the practice of the brain with all the elements of each sentence, even as they type and text and translate all the time!) Once they can wield sentences with clauses of “but” and “however”, and try conditionals, expand their vocabulary, and show more confidence with tenses, they always want to attain a higher level of mastery. That’s proof that even for non-English native speakers – for whom learning English is still very popular, globally – these are good tips. It’s a challenging, idiosyncratic language. It’s easy for many of us native speakers to be fuzzy on rules, but no bad thing to have those rules handy nonetheless. Thanks, Rebel and WSR!
Can’t tell if you’re kidding? I hope so. This column is for people who write in the English language and wish to do so correctly. Those people are legion; they are not in a bubble, and they don’t exist exclusively on the UWS. They exist all over the world and include all races.
No I’m not kidding. This is just an example of the out of touch hypocrisy rampant in the neighborhood.
hankseses?
You missed Ellen’s last sentence — “Just kidding!” Tom Hankses.
Hankseses, eh? If a group of criminals owned a set of decrepit Crookes radiometers, one might say the crooksʼ Crookesesʼ vanes were in vain.
Your missed Ellen’s penultimate (sorry, not LAST sentence as I wrote to rand above) sentence — “Just kidding!”
No, Dan, I did not miss it: I was merely remarking on the oddness of it and offering my own, similarly ridiculous example, a subtlety I trust YOU didnʼt miss. Crookesesʼ, plural possessive (complete with U+02BC).
Wonderful!
This needs to be enforced by the holiday card printing companies (shutterfly, snapfish, etc). If you try to put “Happy Winter Solstice from the Johnson’s” on a card, you should get a big popup warning you that you’re about to embarrass yourself. Better yet, they should have an upcharge for bad grammar, like they do if you want custom colors.
Love this column! Something to which I look forward (got that right?)
Thank you, Stefanie! 😀
Does Zabars, the store, have an apostrophe? I’ve seen it written with and without, both in reputable publications.
It’s Zabar’s.
You’re thinking of Starbucks.
Hi Ronnie! Great question, and believe me, I looked that one up before sending in this piece! 😀 I saw it with an apostrophe on their website, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been used without elsewhere. Another brand where you sometimes see an apostrophe and sometimes don’t is Kilwins.
The store advertises its name is Zabar’s.
MAMC.
Well, that is the store’s name. Even if it really should be Zabar and Klein’s.
(Klein, as a 1/3 partner starting in 1957 in the moribund store, made the store into what it was until about 2012.)
.
You have a point there!
“1: Alberta ran into the Roberts in Zabar’s. What is the surname of the family Alberta ran into?”
Well, that’s better than the NY Times which called the store Zabars in 2018ish.
Thank you, Ellen. I love the work you do, the film created by you and your husband, and this column in WSR. Here is a proposed topic for another day: ” What is the origin and, more important, the intended significance, of the phrase “as such”? e.g., It is raining today. As such, I will carry an umbrella.
“As such,” in your example sounds a bit off to me, FWIW. “Hence,” or “So” might be an improvement.
Ellen,
Your article includes an interesting but unexplored example of apostrophe subtlety: “Unlike many users of English, I am untroubled by the sight of consecutive *s*ʼs.” (Here Iʼm borrowing paired asterisks from Markdown to indicate italics, a feature unsupported in the comments section, alas.) Would you agree that when writing of multiple upper-case forms of the same letter, it should be “Ss” (no apostrophe or italics), as various sources advise? Also, what would be the plural possessive form of “*s*ʼs”? (Iʼm sure example sentences spring readily to mind!) And similarly, how about the plural possessive of the contraction of “it is”? 😀
[…] You Are Not Keeping Up with the Jones’s […]
I agree in wanting to see “as such” dealt with byEllen. For example:
William is Peter’s only son; as such, he expects to inherit the mansion. Correct?
I handed in my term paper a week ahead of time; as such, I expect extra credit. Incorrect?
I have a last name that ends in s and I hate hate hate how often people get the pluralization wrong. When we got married, my wife and I received a gift from one friend of a nice picture frame with “The [family name]” engraved on it instead of “The [family name]es”,. I have refused to use it, it irritates me every time I see it. I’ve wondered if we could get someone to engrave the “es” on the end of it so we could use it, since it is a nice frame.