In other words, give me lots of dollars, not dollar's. 

My colleague Rusty Bucket asked if I would do a blog on plurals because numerous writers are using an apostrophe to create a plural. Let's start by noting that an apostrophe is used primarily for expressing a possessive -- to signal (magically) that this word owns the following word or words.

When one looks in a grammar book, most of the time one will find the rules for forming the plural smack dab in the middle of possessive usage. That's because many writers confuse the two.

How many times have you seen something like this:

"In saying that a 'house' can make people get divorce's, the 'house' can also bring people together."

In the above sentence "divorces" had an apostrophe in it-- that is possesive usage. Divorces can't own anything can they? The plural for the word is simply "divorces."

The simple rule for possessives is to add an "s."

What is confusing in the English language is that some plurals are formed by an apostrophe "s."

Here they are:

1. Use apostrophes to form the plural for single letters: For example, "I have several A's and B's." "There were numerous p's in the text." She made all "A's."

2. However, do not use an apostrophe for multiple letters. For example, "Do you know your ABCs?"

3. Also, do not use an apostrophe for numbers or years. "They loved the '60s" or "They loved the 1960s." -- Notice that the apostrophe in the first example works to replace the first two digits in the year, but it does not work to form the plural for the years in the decade. Also, here is another example: They had three "1s" and four "9s."

 This might be where the confusion lies. But who knows because most of the time a plural is formed with a simple "s."

I will post more on plurals later (and there are tons of situations for forming the plural), but this is the main rule to be aware of. In the meantime, please send those "dollars," not "dollar's."

To come: Did you know that several words have their own plurals ... (so how do you form their possessives?)

Men, women, children, mice (now that we have a computer mouse, maybe we have a plural for that word that is mouses), deer, feet (just to name a few).